EDUCATION FOR WHAT?
Coleman, Mcalister
Education For What? By McALISTER COLEMAN Martha's Vineyard, Mass. I WAS talking yesterday to a shirt stuffed with a Columbia professor with an English accent, though he has been in this country...
...It refers to St...
...In beautiful organ tones at Commencements, and in glittering prose in his annual reports, the Mastermind of Morningside was wont to refer to the First Secretary as Columbia's most distinguished son...
...It's odd though that they should be drooling about "fascism...
...It is, in short, a struggle for the survival of what we vaguely call a "liberal education...
...Such an education implies a knowledge of, or at all events a nodding acquaintance with, the way in which men and women have tackled the fundamental problems posed by everyday living, in our own times and in the past...
...Instead the Morningside Cafeteria went in for the sort of applied "science" that adorns the pages of Popular Science, classes in "janitorial management" (this is on the level), and seminars on the techinques of coaching football teams...
...In a succession of neighs and whinnies which pass for high Oxonian with the station-wagon set over at Edgartown, the only hoity toity settlement on this otherwise charming island of ours, he informed me that Robert Hutch-ins and Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago were fullblown fascists, that St...
...The notorious anti-labor attitude of official Columbia can be traced directly to this proliferation of the so-called "practical arts...
...However, I won't rub that in...
...But that was long, long ago and maybe things have improved since, though I have my doubts...
...But little by little, as the big factory buildings went up, to the rattling of Nicholas Murray Butler's tin cup around Broad and Wall Streets, this stuff and nonsense about the reason for being and all that was left to a few half starved professors of Greek and philosophy and literature and their deluded though devoted followers...
...Irwin Edman of Columbia, who heads the opposition group, that he does not go along with my stuffed-shirt pundit in the "fasc-ist" smear...
...Servant Or Master...
...It is the struggle between the humanities and the machine...
...It goes deeper than that...
...After all the fight isn't between Columbia and Chicago, nor between Hutchins and Butler...
...Some suckers came across for a whole building to house a fantasy called the School of Journalism...
...However, deny it or not, these scoffers at the idea that a study of "the great books," the writings of St...
...Thomas high among them, will help towards making a community of civilized beings, are doing no good to democracy, education, or their own standing as teachers, if that matters to them...
...Butler's faculty muscle men whose job it was and is to put the finger on anyone suspected of having looked into Homer...
...Into the muddied and mystical murk of 13th Century thinking "The Angelic Doctor" carried the light of reason, common sense, and objectivity...
...I WAS talking yesterday to a shirt stuffed with a Columbia professor with an English accent, though he has been in this country since the age of 10 and is now on the strabilious side of CO...
...The civilised man must accept both, but in the liberal scheme of things, the machine will be the servant, not the master, of the spirit of man...
...Then they got them a school of business, wherein promising young Simon Legrees learned personnel management, a fancy expression for sweating the help, spying on the hands, and breaking strikes, a sort of cultural adaptation of the techniques of Pearl Bergoff and his "finks" and "nobles...
...The fact that Hamilton's stay at old King's College was purely a hit and run affair and that he never was graduated, in no way detracted from the impressiveness of these organ recitals...
...The center of intellectual fascism in New York City was for years the Casa Italiana, an institution connected with Columbia, where the sympathizers with the Black Shirts congregated to rejoice over the restoration of the Italian train schedules through the efforts of that great and good man, Benito...
...Moderate realism in the philosophic sense, with its foundation in the essence of the individual, stems from the works of Aquinas, John of Salisbury, St...
...In those days an undergraduate in the college end of the university might receive vague hints that at times and on occasions in the history of mankind, human beings had thought about how they happened to get here and where they were going from here...
...In my years of service as a working reporter—not a "journalist," whatever that is—I never ran across argraduate of this institution who was worth the price of the sack and stones for the drowning of him...
...Pretty soon, biceptual individuals would clap us on the back and holler, "Between you and I, I'm a Columbia man myself, Phys...
...It is the triumphant assertion of man as a rational animal, and I mean man in the year 1944 as well as man in 1244...
...Alexander Hamilton was and is the god of this go-getting gang of Dr...
...The opponents of Hutchins would be quick to deny that they are in any way hostile to the idea of a liberal education, and we must say for Prof...
...John's at Annapolis was the breeding ground for a "Thomistic Authoritarianism," and that the entire educational world was on its way to perdition unless we all do something quick to stop young people from reading Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and John Locke...
...At all events the latterday Federalists won a smashing victory over the liberal forces and now they are rightly alarmed at the wind from the west that bears the bad tidings of a revolt against vocationalism and the general mechanization of learning...
...Though the bulk of the bright young business boys thought Alexander Hamilton was running the Institute that bore his name, that wasn't Nicholas Murray Butler's fault...
...Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus...
...Columbia's Commercial Cafeteria In lining up with President Hutchins whose common sense, concrete proposals for renovating if not revolutionizing the educational system at Chicago were succinctly stated by Milton Mayer in the May 1 issue of The Progressive, I am turning traitor to my own Alma Mater, Columbia University, which sent me out unarmed into a hostile world in 1909...
...The 'Liberal Education' Row This thundering row which has fluttered the academic dovecotes from Nicholas Murray Butler's educational bargain basement to the Pacific Coast's University of Washington would seem to have little relation to the bread and butter matters which are the chief concern of all of us, were it not for the fact that it has a lot to do with what sort of world we want to live in, when the guns are finally quiet...
...Thomas Aquinas, whose "magnificent synthesis is now universally recognized as one of the greatest works of human thought," as a contemporary writer puts it...
...To attempt to equate it with the howl-ings of Hitler or the mouthings of the late Mussolini is a manifestation of the "ignorance of the educated" that would have fascinated G. K. Chesterton, who originated that phrase...
...I don't want you to think that this "Thomistic" thing has anything to do with the campaign for Norman Thomas on the Socialist ticket for the Presidency...
...I was working on the old New York Sun at the time and after looking over a few end-products of this new belt-line we made it a strict rule that any applicant for a job, coming out of the School of Journalism, should be hastily bundled into a weighted sack and thrown into the East River...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 31
