Thorstein Veblen

“ It is not intended, seriously and as a practical measure, to propose the abolition of the president's office, or of the governing board; nor is it intended to intimate that the captain of erudition can be dispensed with in fact. He is too dear to the commercialized popular imagination, and he fits too convincingly into the businessmen's preconceived scheme of things, to permit any such sanguine hope of surcease from skilled malpractice and malversation. ”

“ It is only that the affairs of the higher learning have come definitively to take a subsidiary, or putative, place. In these establishments; and to all appearance irretrievably so, because both are now committed to so large and exacting a volume of obligations and liabilities, legal and customary, extraneous and alien to their legitimate interest, that there is no longer a reasonable chance of their coming to anything of serious import in the way of the higher learning, even, conceivably, under the most enlightened management in the calculable future. ”

“ So far as any university administration can, with the requisite dignity, permit itself to avow a pursuit of notoriety, the gain that is avowedly sought by its means is an increase of funds, -- more or less ingenuously spoken of as an increase of equipment. An increased enrolment of students will be no less eagerly sought after, but the received canons of academic decency require this object to be kept even more discreetly masked than the quest of funds. ”

“ But, it should be called to mind, the training that makes a typical executive comes with the most felicitous and indefeasible effect not in the predisposing discipline of candidature but in the workday conduct of office. And so consistent and unremitting is this drift of the duties of office, overt and covert, that, humanly speaking, any one who submits to its discipline through an appreciable period of years must unavoidably come to conform to type. ”

“ In the uncritical eyes of the commonplace men of affairs, whose experience in business has trained them into a quasi-tropismatic approval of notoriety as a means of advertising, these puerile demonstrations will, of course, have a high value simply in their own right. ”

“ And there appears to be no reason why a similarly stale routine of futility should not overtake the universities, and give similarly foolish results, as fast as the system of standardization, accountancy and piece-work goes consistently into effect, -- except only for the continued enforced employment of a modicum of impracticable scholars and scientists on the academic staff, whose unbusinesslike scholarly proclivities and inability to keep the miner's-inch of scholastic credit always in mind, must in some measure always defeat the perfect working of standardization and accountancy. ”

“ Objection to any such measure of abolition is not to be grounded in their impracticability or their inefficiency, -- supposing only that they could be carried out in the face of the prejudices of the ignorant and of the selfishly interested parties; the obstacles to any such move lie simply in the popular prejudice which puts implicit faith in large, complicated, and formidable organizations, and in that appetite for popular prestige that animates the class of persons from which the boards and executives are drawn. ”

“ By usage, guided, no doubt, by a shrewd sense of expediency in the choice of means, it has, in the typical case, come to be the settled policy of these incumbents of executive office to seek the competitively requisite measure of public prestige chiefly by way of public oratory. Now and again his academic rank, backed by the slow-dying tradition that his office should be filled by a man of scholarly capacity, will bring the incumbent before some scientific body or other; where he commonly avoids offence. ”

“ There is a small class of American university corporations that are so placed, by the peculiar circumstances of their endowment, as to be above the apprehension of need, so long as they are content to live anywhere nearly within the domain of learning; at the same time that they have nothing to lose through alienating the affections of the vulgar, and nothing to gain by deferring to the sentimental infirmities of elderly well-to-do persons. ”

“ As intimated above, men with ingrained scholarly ideals and a consistent aim to serve the ends of learning will still occasionally be drawn into the executive office by force of circumstances -- particularly by force of the slow-dying preconception that the preferences of the academic staff should count for something in the choice of their senior member; and this will happen in spite of the ubiquitous candidature of aspirants who have prepared themselves for this enterprise by sedulous training in all the arts of popularity and by a well organized backing of influential "friends." ”

“ But the magnitude and comprehensive aims of the new establishments are such as to take them out of the category of auxiliaries and throw them into the lead. They are assuming to take over the advance in science and scholarship, which has by tradition belonged under the tutelage of the academic community. This move looks like a desperate surrender of the university ideal. The reason for it appears to be the proven inability of the schools, under competitive management, to take care of the pursuit of knowledge. ”

“ The duties of the executive -- aside from the calls of publicity and self-aggrandizement -- are in the main administrative duties that have to do with the interstitial adjustments of the composite establishment. These resolve themselves into a co-ordinated standardization of the several constituent schools and divisions, on a mechanically specified routine and scale, which commonly does violence to the efficient working of all these diverse and incommensurable elements; with no gain at any point, excepting a gain in the facility of control control for control's sake, at the best. ”

“ Any one who cares to take stock of that matter and is in a position to know what is going on can easily assure himself that the reasons which decide in such a case are not advisedly accepted reasons intrinsic to the needs of efficiency for the work in hand, but rather reasons of competitive expediency, of competitive advantage and of prestige; except in so far as it may all be -- as perhaps it commonly is -- mere unreflecting conformity to the current fashion. ”

“ And, as is true of advertising in other competitive business, current university publicity is not an effective means of spreading reliable information; nor is it designed for that end. Here as elsewhere, to meet the requirements of competitive enterprise, advertising must somewhat exceed the point of maximum veracity.
In no field of human endeavour is competitive notoriety and a painstaking conformity to extraneous standards of living and of conduct so gratuitous a burden, since learning is in no degree a competitive enterprise ”

“ But since it is only for purposes external, not to say extraneous, to the corporation of learning that this prestige value is seriously worth while, it is also only toward the outside that the make-believe of presidential erudition and scholarly ideals need seriously be kept up. For the common run of the incumbents today to pose before their faculties as in any eminent degree conversant with the run of contemporary science or scholarship, or as rising to the average even of their own faculties in this respect, would be as bootless as it is uncalled for. ”

“ So that, unlike what happens in the business community at large, no standardization has here determined the limits of legitimate prevarication; nor can such a standardization and limit be worked out so long as the executive is required, in effect, to function as the discretionary employer of his academic staff and hold them to account as agents for whom he is responsible, at the same time that he must, in appearance, be their confidential spokesman and their colleague in the corporation of learning. ”

“ Business principles take effect in academic affairs most simply, obviously and avowably in the way of a businesslike administration of the scholastic routine; where they lead immediately to a bureaucratic organization and a system of scholastic accountancy. In one form or another, some such administrative machinery is a necessity in any large school that is to be managed on a centralized plan; as the American schools commonly are, and as, more particularly, they aim to be. ”

“ Not only must a creditable publicity be provided for, as one of the running cares of the administration, but every feature of academic life, and of the life of all members of the academic staff, must unremittingly (though of course unavowedly) be held under surveillance at every turn, with a view to furthering whatever may yield a reputable notoriety, and to correcting or eliminating whatever may be conceived to have a doubtful or untoward bearing in this respect. ”

“ Among the genial make-believe that goes to dignify the executive office is a dutiful protest, indeed, a somewhat clamorous protest, of conspicuous self-effacement on the part of the incumbent, to the effect that the responsibilities of office have come upon him unsought, if not unawares ”

“ But even when taken at its best, and when relieved of the inhibition and deflection worked by the executive, such an academic body can doubtless be counted on to manage its collective affairs somewhat clumsily and incompetently. There can be no hope of trenchant policy and efficient control at their hands; and, it should be added, there need be no great fear of such an outcome. The result should, in so far, be nearly clear gain, as against the current highly efficient management by an executive. Relatively little administration or control would be needed in the resulting small-scale units ”

“ By tradition, and in the genial legendary lore that colours the proceedings of the faculty-meeting, he is still the senior member of an assemblage of scholarly gentlemen; but in point of executive fact he is their employer, who does business with and by them on a commercial footing. To the faculty, the presidential office is a business proposition, and its incumbent is chiefly an object of circumspection, to whom they owe a "hired-man's loyalty." ”

“ Indeed, some of the most pathetic clamour for popular renown, as well as instances of the most profligate stooping to vulgar prejudice, are to be credited to establishments of this, potentially independent, class. The management, apparently, are too well imbued with the commonplace preconceptions of worldly wisdom afloat among the laity, to admit of their taking any action on their own deliberate initiative or effectually taking thought of that pursuit of learning that has been entrusted to their care. ”

“ The gross aggregate funds contributed to university uses from all sources would in all probability be nearly as large in the absence of such competitive notoriety and conformity. Indeed, it should seem likely that such donors as are gifted with sufficient sense of the value of science and scholarship to find it worth while to sink any part of their capital in that behalf would be somewhat deterred by the spectacle of competitive waste and futile clamour presented by this academic enterprise ”

“ By force of circumstances, chief of which is the executive office, the faculties have become deliberative bodies charged with power to talk. Their serious attention has been taken up with schemes for weighing imponderables and correlating incommensurables, with such a degree of verisimilitude as would keep the statistics and accountancy of the collective administration in countenance, and still leave some play in the joints of the system for the personal relation of teacher and disciple. It is a nice problem in self-deception, chiefly notable for an endless proliferation. ”

“ It is not that either of these two great schools is to be rated as useless for whatever each is good for, but only that that pursuit of learning on which both set out in the beginning has fallen into abeyance, by force of circumstances as they impinge on the sensibilities of a discretionary executive. As vocational schools and as establishments for the diffusion of salutary advice on the state of mankind at large, both are doubtless all that might be desired ”

“ Taken as a whole, and counting in all the wide-ranging expenditure entailed by this enterprise in notoriety and the maintenance of academic prestige, university publicity doubtless costs appreciably more than it brings. So far as it succeeds in its purpose, its chief effect is to divert the flow of funds from one to another of the rival establishments. In the aggregate this expedient for procuring means for the advancement of learning doubtless results in an appreciable net loss.
The net loss, indeed, is always much more considerable than would be indicated by any statistical showing ”

“ The visible drift of things in this respect in the academic pursuit of the social sciences, so-called, is an argument as to what may be hoped for in the domain of academic science at large. It is only that the executive is actuated by a sharper solicitude to keep the academic establishment blameless of anything like innovation or iconoclasm at this point; which reinforces the drift toward a mechanistic routine and a curtailment of inquiry in this field ”

“ Doubtless, the largest, tone-giving and effective, constituent in this self-selected public on whose temper the university president typically leans, and from whose bent his canons of circumspection are drawn, is the class of moderately well-to-do and serious-minded women who have outlived the distractions of maternity, and so have come to turn their parental solicitude to the common good, conceived as a sterilization of the proprieties. ”

“ In all its multifarious ways and means, university advertising carried beyond the modicum that would serve a due "publicity of accounts" as regards the work to be done, accomplishes no useful aggregate result. ”

“ At the same time, by provocation of the facilities which it offers for making an impressive demonstration, such bureaucratic organization will lead the university management to bend its energies with somewhat more singleness to the parade of magnitude and statistical gains. It also, and in the same connection, provokes to a persistent and detailed surveillance and direction of the work and manner of life of the academic staff, and so it acts to shut off initiative of any kind in the work done. ”

“ So that on its face this whole academic traffic in publicity and genteel conventionalities appears to be little else than a boyish imitation of the ways and means employed, with shrewd purpose, in business enterprise that has no analog with the pursuit of knowledge. But the aggregate yearly expenditure of the universities on this competitive academic publicity runs well up into the millions, and it involves also an extensive diversion of the energies of the general body of academic men to these purposes of creditable notoriety ”

“ So that an executive who aspires to do his whole duty in these premises will become in some sort an itinerant dispensary of salutary verbiage; and university presidents have so come to be conventionally indispensable for the effusion of graceful speech at all gatherings of the well-to-do for convivial deliberation on the state of mankind at large. ”

“ The executive and all his works and words must avoid blame from any source from which criticism might conceivably affect the traffic with which he is occupied,such is the first of those politic principles that govern the conduct of competitive business. The university must accordingly be managed with a first view to a creditable rating in those extraneous respects, touching which that select laity that make up the executive's effective public are competent to hold convictions. ”

“ The directive hands, too, under whose discretionary control each of these establishments entered on its adventures and attained its distinctive character, were men who, at one point or another in their administration of academic policy, entertained a sincerely conceived scholarly ambition to create a substantial university, an institution of learning. ”