and which is quite out of keeping with the tendency that I am discussing
and deploring. Yet it is doubtful whether, outside the circle of the
universities themselves, and of those individuals who are thoroughly
imbued with the university spirit, there is any true realization of what
it is that constituted the head and front of that offending. If some
bureau of research were to present a formidable array of figures showing
that the "output" of professorial work could be increased by so and so
many per cent. through the adoption of some definitely formulated system
of "scientific management," it is by no means certain that the scheme
would not receive powerful support in the highest quarters of efficiency
propaganda. We should be told just how many millions of dollars a year we
are spending on university education, and just how many of these millions
go needlessly to waste. Even the opponents of the "reform" would probably
find themselves compelled to use as their most powerful argument this and
that example of great practical results which have flowed from letting men
of genius go their own way. It would be pointed out that many an
investigation which, to the authorities of the time, appeared wholly
unpromising, turned out to be of cardinal value. We should be warned that
what we gain in a thousand cases through time-clock and card-catalogue
methods, might be lost ten times over through the shackling of the
initiative of a single man of unrecognized genius. And all this would be
very much to the purpose; but it is not upon any such special pleading
that the case ought to be made to rest. The loss that would be suffered
transcends all these concrete and definable instances of it. It would be
pervasive, fundamental, immeasurable. Grievous as might be the injury
caused by the prevention of specific achievements of exceptional
importance, this would be as nothing in comparison with the intellectual
and spiritual loss entailed by the lowering of the human level, the
devitalizing of the intellectual atmosphere, which must inevitably follow
upon the application of factory methods to university life.