第75章 CHAPTER VI(5)

This incursion of pecuniary ideals in academic policy is seen at its broadest and baldest in the Schools of Commerce, --"Commerce and Politics," "Business Training," "Commerce and Administration," "Commerce and Finance," or whatever may be the phrase selected to designate the supersession of learning by worldly wisdom. Facility in competitive business is to take the place of scholarship, as the goal of university training, because, it is alleged, the former is the more useful. The ruling interest of Christendom, in this view, is pecuniary gain. And training for commercial management stands to this ruling interest of the modern community in a relation analogous to that in which theology and homiletics stood to the ruling interest in those earlier times when the salvation of men's souls was the prime object of solicitude. Such a seminary of business has something of a sacerdotal dignity. It is the appointed keeper of the higher business animus.(7*)Such a school, with its corps of instructors and its equipment, stands in the university on a tenure similar to that of the divinity school. Both schools are equally extraneous to that "intellectual enterprise" in behalf of which, ostensibly, the university is maintained. But while the divinity school belongs to the old order and is losing its preferential hold on the corporation of learning, the school of commerce belongs to the new order and is gaining ground. The primacy among pragmatic interests has passed from religion to business, and the school of commerce is the exponent and expositor of this primacy. It is the perfect flower of the secularization of the universities. 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.

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. But the College of Commerce stands out pre-eminent among these various training schools in two respects: (a) 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;(8*)(b) in varying degrees, the proficiency given by training in the other professional schools, and required for the efficient pursuit of the other professions, may be serviceable to the community at large; whereas the business proficiency inculcated by the schools of commerce has no such serviceability, being directed singly to a facile command of the ways and means of private gain.(9*) 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. 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.