and Independent

December 5, 1928

time since the beginning of higher education in Amer

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ica has the criticism of our colleges and universities been so general and so bitter as it is today. Everybody takes fling at these institutions and almost every one has some pet theory as to what should be

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done. Reforms are abroad in the land. A hopeful aspect of all this is that the criticism comes largely from within the universities rather than from without. dents, instructors, professors, deans, provosts, sometimes even presidents, analyse and pronounce remedies. Wisconsin has its experimental college, Minnesota and Chicago their orientation courses, Swarthmore her highly developed "honors" program, Columbia a new curriculum, Michigan a scheme for a new "University College," Princeton a preceptorial plan, Harvard a "reading period" and so it goes. One may safely count that day lost when in some educational journal he finds no new scheme announced for saving the college to education. Every one is looking for a panacea and every one is finding it in some reorganization of present machinery.

In so far as these schemes are efforts to return education to the student they probably all have elements of value; in so far as they try to turn the trick simply by a new hocus-pocus they are futile. Possibly twenty years of teaching have blinded my vision and my sense of values, but most of this experimentation seems to me secondary rather than primary. I know no way to secure good teaching without a willingness on the part of university administrators to

recognize it in some sincere way when it is found. What is most needed is an honest recognition of the significance of a teacher who is vitally interested in his subject, who has a half-creditable personality, and who is able to enter his classroom without a sense of boredom

and tired superiority. Yet to my knowledge very few institutions make any definite effort to secure this sort of instruction or to nurture it when they find it.

And I am convinced that when the good teachers do find their way into a college faculty their best efforts are actually suppressed by the mechanics of the academic system which prevails today. Where men have maintained high teaching standards-and, thank God, there are usually two or three such in every university-their powers have been impaired by the system imposed on them by the ruthless drive of higher education the Juggernaut of administration, routine and, worst of all, the pot-pourri of activities represented by the catch-phrase of "service to the people." The enemy is within the gates.

Nay, the enemy is the very university itself. I am not so very unfair to education today when I say that many of

our larger institutions are throwing themselves as willing and eager sacrifices before the Juggernaut of off-campus activities. Extension courses, short courses, institutes, correspondence teaching, "adult education," extra-curricular service-popular lectures given by faculty members, field research, help of one type or another to outside organizations -all these things and many more are coming into an importance which threatens to overshadow the lone figure of the student walking under memorial elms in the vain delusion that he is acquiring learning. Education is a business with as many offices as classrooms and almost as many secretaries and stenographers as professors. The student on the campus receives an everdecreasing part of the professor's attention. The faculty is exploited for the self-aggrandizement of the institution and legitimate teaching is allowed to go by the board. "Better one column on the front page of a leading daily in the State," college administrators too often think, "than one hour or twenty hours of honest teaching in the classroom."

The modern professor, scorn to admit it though he may, is a first cousin of the Rotarian and Kiwanian. The wheel of the Juggernaut car revolves down the concrete road and the college professor clings, fly-like, precariously to a safe part of the rim. He knows he isn't making the wheel go; the most he hopes for is that he can hang on until the infernal thing stops. The evils are not ten-fold, five-fold, or three-fold, as various diagnosticians suggest. The evil is simplicity itself; few in administrative authority sincerely care a damn for

good and effective teaching when it means even a slight sacrifice in the speed of the Juggernaut. The business of education is organized on another basis.

Let me be specific.

I presume it is safe to assume that a man upon entering a profession is only human if he shows ambition to rise within that profession. Society is at least in the habit of recognizing promotion as a sign of meritorious service. No one is likely to blame a man for seeking success; rather society condemns him if he does not. But what brings success in the field of college teaching. Is it, as presumably it should be, successful college teaching? Rarely. Rather it is a confusion of a half-dozen elements some of which are remote from service in the classroom, some absolutely inimicable to it. Promotion goes most quickly to the man who attracts attention to himself outside of teaching.

First among these non-teaching activities is the item of research which every self-respecting institution, whether it have a graduate school or not, somehow pretends to expect from its faculty. Woe to the man in some institutions who cannot at the end of the term make a showing in the catalogue or in some bulletin of at least one unread-and too frequently unreadable-"piece of research." Younger faculty men, those most often overworked in other activities, especially feel the prick of this demand. They burn the candle at both ends; with more teaching hours than their elders, they are forced as well into individual study in some neglected and insignificant field. And a lighted candle burning at both ends. Miss Millay to the contrary, makes no very lovely light. I am not so foolish as to argue that advanced and original study in one's field hampers teaching. Certainly it need not do so, and, properly emphasized, should make a man a more valuable instructor. But the emphasis placed on research by administrators is infinitely stronger than on teaching. How often in academic circles one hears this slur: "He's not a research man, you know!" The result is that the ambitious instructor lets his classes go and grinds out a paper to see the light of day in some scholarly journal or to be read before an empty room at some association meeting where his colleagues of other institutions are assembled to smoke in the corridors and find new jobs at fatter salaries.

There are, however, worse enemies to good teaching than research. Somehow the democratic ideal of which we all talk so glibly eats the heart out of the college teacher in its demand that he take an active part in petty administration. Properly appointed officers seldom rule with an iron hand; they are either idealists or arch passers of the buck. They always insist on committees for every new venture. In the university which I know best there are twenty-six standing committees and at least forty-six running ones. They range all the way from advisory and executive committees elected by the faculty to lesser groups on faculty living conditions (a committee which bestirs itself now and then to make a

Ewing Galloway

Campanile of the University of California

report when rents become too high or the price of milk is raised exhorbitantly) and committees which meet annually to report on student morality, entrance requirements, or public occasions and celebrations.

There are men in this institution holding appointments in eight or ten of these standing committees and trailing along breathlessly in half a dozen more of the running committees which often run themselves out before they find just why they were brought into being. When any instructor feels the first rumblings of an idea, he inadvertently presents it in some dull moment of faculty meeting. And lo! before he knows it another committee is in existence and, more than likely, he is the new chairman. Each department, each school, each unit of administration is constantly meeting new problems and

as constantly discussing them through the committee method.

"Appoint a committee to handle it" is so common a cry when any new idea is broached that any faculty man will recognize the phrase as the pass-word of his order. I could walk into the Grand Central station when a thousand people were catching trains, shout out "Let's appoint a committee" and then pick out every college professor in the station by the sad look of recognition which would come into his countenance. I have no foolish hope that committee work can be dispensed with in our universities and colleges, but surely it is not too much to argue that these petty administrative responsibilities are direct enemies of the best teaching, since memberships in these groups usually fall to some few men who gain reputations as committee bears and, consequently, are overburdened in this service. Effective teaching and long hours of committee service simply do not go together.

But both research and committee work find more justification in university organization than does the third enemy to good teaching: the extracurricular activities which are expected of college professors. Many a man today keeps his position on a university faculty simply because he is a good liaison officer between his institution and the women's clubs, the business organizations, or one sort or another of the State's activities.

Take the matter of off-campus lectures. A "good" faculty member today in these State institutions is one who holds himself in readiness to "give his services to the State"-a pretty euphemism for deserting his classroom. Possibly the most common form of lecturing is that which takes men away from the campus to talk to a women's club, a Rotary meeting, a chamber of commerce, or a high school commencement gathering.

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EFORE me lies a bulletin from one State university giving titles of lectures made available to the good people of the State by its faculty. The women's club element I represent by a few titles chosen from perhaps a thousand: "The Romance of Opium," "Deirdre Dramatized," "Egyptian Art," "Perfumes in the Making," "Romanticism in Music," and "Impressions of Spain." And what antic fellows we academicians are when we try to appear light and breezy: "Psychoses and Anti-Social

Behavior," "Putting Character in Business Correspondence," "The Etiology of Bright's Disease and Certain Related Toxæmas," "The Submicroscopic Structure of the Universe." And how we popularize ponderous subjects: "Overhead and Turnover" (which sounds as though it might be a pet subject with the director of physical education but which, in reality, hails from the School of Pharmacy) is one; "Drug Store Lizards" (which somehow should come from the School of Pharmacy but actually is a talk offered by the Young Men's Christian Association secretary) is another. My own institution maintains a fleet of Fords for impoverished college professors that these men may scatter over the State to carry culture and refinement in fifty-minute dispensings. "Service" is as much the watchword of the modern university as it is of any garage, but too often the service is accorded to the State at large at the expense of its sons and daughters registered on the campus as students.

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o great has this Juggernaut system grown, so commanding is this word "service," that the man is lucky whose time and patience and teaching-capacity are not eaten into by this extra-curricular work. Faculty men are constantly bemoaning the interest of undergraduates in "campus activities" and their lack of interest in their studies. Yet these same professors under the system now operating are tarred with the same stick. The only difference is that the student confines his activity to the campus and the professor must needs "serve the State." Mass education with all its abracadabra is content only to go through the forms of education even at the same time that it regrets the departure of honest intellectual curiosity on the part of students, and sincere teaching by its faculty.

But lecturing is only one phase of this extra-curricular activity of the college professor. There are as many other side-shows-each with its own ballyhoo-as in the "world's greatest circus." Professors are great makers of textbooks in or out of their fieldand students in their classes keep on buying them. The teachers of science serve the State and private corporations in countless ways; the psychologist and penologist are advisers to State departments; sanitary and civil engineers give advice to one commission or another; the geologist and forester advise on conservation and mineral deposits; public health measures take the time of the

circulated by a leading publisher, to writing one book after another, and to conducting annual and semi-annual institutes for workers in his field. His name is known to every one in his subject and to many more. Yet here on the campus an undergraduate hardly knows him and rarely enjoys the benefit either of his instruction or of his ripened experience. One of the most valuable men on the faculty, he finds it necessary, because of the pressure of these demands, to give his service to others than students, to people who have never so much as walked through our campus.

HEN there is L-, a professor of one

States Government now and then calls for a man to serve in one capacity or another; this corporation or that asks for chemical analyses of some of its by products; State Legislatures ask that surveys be made; and the home State or an adjacent State calls in school of education specialists to tread where even angels fear to walk. Accounting experts in the faculty audit books for State and private organizations; professors gain a reputation in a field and are called upon for commercial lecturing; magazines, newspapers, publishing houses urge men to write of their specialties.

A half-dozen close-at-home instances of men who, because of these very extracurricular activities, are prevented from giving their best work to undergraduates will come to the mind of any faculty member in any institution in the country. There is, for example, my friend M- who, with years of rich experience back of him, rarely teaches an undergraduate class and more and more passes on his graduate work to younger men in his growing department. His own time goes to editing a learned journal, to supervising a series of books

or four rare teachers here, what does he do? One undergraduate class—and a large one-benefits by his teaching each term; one graduate class has the same privilege. But the rest of the time? Well, he edits a popular newspaper feature which carries the name of the university throughout the section; he carries on researches which lately have meant one volume a year in his field; he publishes regularly in the magazines. Now and then a lecture to some organization in this or an adjacent State takes him off the campus. Where a few years ago he gave himself generously to this and that undergraduate group, they are now obliged to be content with a Friday night at his home, a night when these students flow over the house, listen to good talk, enjoy good reading and bask-for the few hours he jealously saves for them in the light of his personality and leadership.

Again, there is K-. In 1919 he came to the faculty a young lieutenant of Marines fresh from the intensities of French battlefields. An alumnus of this university, he immediately stepped into a dozen of the undergraduate activities. (Please Turn to Page 1295)

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MAMMOTH face looms before you; a face five feet across, making ghastly contortions. A stupendous bleat, something about "my maa-uh-a-uh-a-mee!" dins in your ears. You squirm in front of it, unable to escape; shut your eyes in an effort to dodge the grimaces, but cannot do anything about that bellow which still pounds on your tympanum. You consider crawling under the seat, but are afraid an usher will see you. It sounds like a nightmare; it is a talking movie.

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To be exact, it is a synchronized film of a vaudeville artiste singing "mammy" song. This is a short talkie subject designed to round out the entertainment in movie houses in place of vaudeville acts, or of a stirring number from "Lives of the Composers." One company alone is turning out four hundred of these sound shorts in the present season. With them on the bill will, of course, be a full-length feature picture, with or without sound effects and dialogue, but from now on, it is safe to predict, it will be increasingly with. It is too late already to do anything for the silent drama but mourn. Gone is the restful charm of the motion picture palace, where thoughtful people could go and ruminate; attend to the picture if it wasn't too terrible and, if it was, allow their mind to wander, and hold their sweetie's hand. Unfortunately something even more important than this is threatened along with it, and that is a pantomimic art which was beginning to get somewhere.

Most of the talkies made so far have been dismally bad, but it is not altogether their badness which has disheartened those who liked the movies. It is the realization that this invention has thrown the old motion picture into utter confusion and may kill it entirely. They are predicting that the next few years will see the triumph of a new medium which is neither silent drama nor proper spoken drama, but a misbegotten mixture of the two. They say that the movies will talk themselves to death, for once the short and easy road of speech is open, what is to prevent the producers from tossing aside all they have learned about the art of visual expression?

I believe there is a good deal to prevent it, but I shall come to that later. For the present, however, there is no doubt that the talkies have set back the swift and exciting growth of this infant art a good many years, even if, as there is reason to hope, they have not arrested it permanently.

HE TERM "sound picture" is as wide

Tas charity. The public is invited to

"See and hear" films which offer nothing but old-time silent drama, except that its musical accompaniment is recorded on a disc or a strip of film instead of being rendered on the Wurlitzer organ. Other films labeled "with sound" are in that class by grace of miscellaneous roars and rattlings, which are synchronized posthumously. Under this system "The Birth of a Nation" could now be trotted out as a sound picture.

Needless to say, however, it is not such types of production which are causing the stir, but dialogue films of the kind appropriately designated "alltalking," because the characters do nothing else. On the technical side these pictures of the "all-talking" variety are already getting over their early crudities. Voices in the better presentations no longer crackle and grunt, but proceed from the screen in smooth and plausible modulations. It now appears, furthermore, that film conversation need not be deafening; in "Interference," the first full-dialogue effort of Paramount, it was as consciously and carefully lowpitched as the speech of a self-made lady. But the suavity of such a production, gratifying as it is, makes its weakness stand out all the more. The producers are obviously so concerned with giving the customers their money's worth of talk that they paralyze the action. The cus

tomers are so pleased over something new that they do not mind, and neither do most of the critics, who are pleased almost as easily as the customers. But here and there a faint voice is raised to point out that so far talk has killed movement in the new movie.

Many of those who protest are making talkies themselves. Last summer, when excitement over the new development mounted to panic in Hollywood, a large number of the most brilliant directors and actors of the screen resented the innovation, some of them very bitterly. Many of them declared then that the talkies were a passing fad, but this assertion has been heard much less frequently of late. It may still be true, but at the moment the cash argument is silencing all skeptics. Fifteen hundred theatres will have completed sound installations a few weeks from now, and they include practically all of the firstrun houses and the large chains. Every big producer has been investing upwards of a million dollars-sometimes much more-on sound stages and mechanisms, and one may conclude that he will not let it go without a struggle. It all dates back to two or three years ago, when the Warner Brothers, being a tight place financially, thought they saw a way out in certain neglected patents for synchronizing films with music-perhaps even with speechwhich were owned by the Western Electric. The method they chose, and to which they gave the trade name of Vitaphone, is distinguished by the fact that the sound accompaniment is recorded on a disc. The disc revolving on a turn table which is geared with the projecting apparatus. At almost the same time the Fox Film corporation began experimenting with another Western Electric system in which the sound is photoelectrically reproduced on the edge of the strip of film. They called their

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method Movietone.

One or both of the Western Electric systems are being used by all the important producers except Pathé and FBO, which have the R. C. A. Photophone, another sound-on-film method which was perfected more recently. There are on the market a flock of independent devices with names like Phono