College and Research Libraries


is a new four-year college made up of 
grades eleven, twelve, thirteen, and four-
teen and a high school that begins with 
grade seven and extends through grade 
ten. T h e College remains a two-year unit 
just as it was before the creation of the 
new four-year unit. 

" T h e private institutions receive no 
financial assistance from governmental 
units." (p. 97) T h e r e are many excep-
tions.—George A. Works, University of 
Chicago. 

Chancellor Kirkland of Vanderbilt. Ed-
win Mims. Vanderbilt University 
Press, Nashville, 1940. xvii, 362P. $3. 
T H E BOOK follows in part the conven-

tional pattern of biographies, tracing the 
ancestry and boyhood of Kirkland, his 
education, his teaching experience in a 
country school, in a private school, at 
W o f f o r d College, his alma mater, and his 
university experience at Leipzig and Ber-
lin, when Americans who desired advanced 
work were compelled to go to G e r m a n y ; 
it tells how "denominational considera-
tions" seemed to keep the young M e t h o -
dist from securing the chair of English 
at the University of N o r t h Carolina, "and 
a Baptist was appointed in order to keep 
the balance between the denominations in 
the faculty." Efforts were made to secure 
a professorship for Kirkland in the U n i -
versity of South Carolina, but the de-
nominational interests and press of that 
state made the going of that institution 
hard also. But three weeks after his 
return from Germany, Kirkland was elec-
ted to the professorship of Latin at Van-
derbilt, where he served as teacher and 
chancellor until his resignation in 1937. 
H e had been chancellor of that institution 
since 1893—perhaps the longest period 
of service that any man has had to date 

as a university head in this country. 
Subsequent developments appear in gen-

eral to support the wisdom of many of 
Kirkland's far-reaching decisions on edu-
cational policies: his position on academic 
and collegiate education in the Southern 
states and his work for the establishment 
and maintenance of respectable standards, 
at a time when both the high schools and 
colleges were almost chaotic in that 
section, and his leadership in the organiza-
tion and direction of the Southern Asso-
ciation of Colleges and Secondary Schools; 
his performance of what may have seemed 
to some people m a j o r operations to save 
Vanderbilt from its inferior medical facili-
ties and to build in Nashville a distin-
guished medical center; his position in 
the bitter contest with the General Con-
ference of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church, South, and the College of Bishops 
over the control of V a n d e r b i l t — " T h e 
T e n - Y e a r s ' W a r , 1904-1914"—in which 
the Supreme Court of Tennessee decided 
with the university against the General 
Conference and the Board of T r u s t — a 
remarkable chapter in the history of higher 
education in this country. H i s answer 
to the "foolishness" of Tennessee's anti-
evolution law and the Scopes trial at 
Dayton was "to build more scientific lab-
oratories." 

A dictator Kirkland may have seemed 
to some people. I t does appear that he 
did not always heed the counsel which 
J e t h r o gave his great son-in-law, for now 
and then he was "criticized for doing 
everything himself." And it also appears 
that now and then he subscribed, as he 
may have felt compelled to do, to the 
alleged dictum of Benjamin J o w e t t , the 
English scholar and theologian who was 
for many years M a s t e r of Balliol Col-
lege, O x f o r d : "Never retract, never ex-

250 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



plain, get the thing done, let them howl." 
If, like Moses, Kirkland never did fully 
learn how to delegate authority he never-
theless seemed to learn with J o w e t t never 
to make the same mistake the second time. 
H e doubtless knew that one who occupies 
a college or university presidency in the 
United States holds an almost impossible 
post and is bound to make some mistakes; 
but the best that the best of such officers 
can hope for is to avoid making any 
but small mistakes.—Edgar TV. Knight, 
University of North Carolina, Chapel 
Hill. 

Too Much College, or Education Is Eat-
ing Up Life. . . . Stephen Leacock. 
Dodd, Mead, 1940. 255p. $2. 
" E D U C A T I O N is eating up life" is the 

theme of this, Stephen Leacock's latest 
humorous sally against the windmills of 
formal education. W e spend too much 
time and money, he claims, and too much 
of our valuable youth, acquiring the di-
plomas—the formal insignia of modern 
education—and too little preparation for 
the real work of life. By making us 
laugh, he makes us listen, using half-truths 
in argument for, as he says, "a half-truth 
—like a half brick, carries better." 

Economics, asserts Leacock, is a mass 
of technical verbiage; psychology, "the 
black a r t , " a parasite battening upon phi-
losophy, art, and science; the educational 
value of Latin is overlooked; teaching of 
foreign languages is a f a r c e ; modern Eng-
lish spelling is illogical; mathematics, a 
series of "puzzles" bearing little relation 
to reality. 

Although he laughs as he talks, we 
know that this keen, kindly jokester is 
a friendly critic who might well be taken 
seriously.—Morris A. Gelfand, Queens 
College Library, Flushing, N.Y. 

The Acquisition and Cataloging of Books; 
Papers Presented before the Library In-
stitute at the University of Chicago, 
July 29 to August 9, 194.0. Edited by 
William M . Randall, with an introduc-
tion by Louis R . Wilson. T h e Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1940. ( T h e 
University of Chicago Studies in Li-
brary Science) x, 4o8p. $2.50. 
T H E R E A S O N S for the decision to de-

vote the 1940 Library Institute, the fifth 
annual institute sponsored by the G r a d u -
ate Library School of the University of 
Chicago with the financial assistance of 
the Carnegie Corporation of N e w York, to 
the subject of the acquisition and catalog-
ing of books—the so-called "technical 
processes"—are enumerated by Dean Louis 
R. Wilson in his introduction to this col-
lection of the papers presented at the 
institute. I n the case of the acquisition 
process there are four reasons: ( 1 ) the 
present war and the rising importance of 
America as the preserver of the records of 
civilization, ( 2 ) the reduction of library 
budgets with little prospect of any great 
increase in the immediate future, ( 3 ) the 
growing realization of the necessity of co-
operative acquisition programs and division 
of fields between libraries, and ( 4 ) the 
recent spectacular developments in micro-
photography. I n the case of classification 
and cataloging, there are likewise four 
reasons for the decision: ( 1 ) the lack of 
funds, ( 2 ) the shift of interest from cata-
loging as an end in itself to cataloging as 
a service, ( 3 ) the growth of union catalogs 
and bibliographical centers, and ( 4 ) the 
new developments in photography as ap-
plied to library records. 

T h e papers themselves, numbering 
seventeen in all, have been edited by P r o f . 
William M . Randall, w h o is also the 
author of the opening paper on the tech-

JUNE, 1941 251