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 TRUE AND FALSE STANDARDS 
 OF GRADUATE WORK 
 
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 ANDREW F. WEST 
 
 DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL 
 OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 
 
 Read in Chicago Friday, March 31st, 1905, at the Tenth Annual Meeting 
 of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. 
 
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mercial, technical or other utilitarian influence has 
 swept on unchecked into university life without dis- 
 aster to university ideals. And no great period of 
 intellectual illumination and advance has come to any 
 university in all the time of recorded history except 
 through the self-sacrificing devotion of men to the 
 cause of knowledge as embodied in, or, at least, 
 as closely related to the distinctively liberal arts and 
 sciences. This has been our guiding light always. 
 
 " And when it fails, fight as we will, we die ; 
 And while it lasts, we cannot wholly end." 
 
 A university may have, and a complete univer- 
 sity must have, more than this central faculty of arts 
 and sciences. The professional and technical schools 
 which properly round out the circle, so far from be- 
 ing despised as parts of a university, are the great 
 appliances which connect the ideal centre of know- 
 ledge with the practical needs of the world. A law 
 school, a medical school, an engineering school, all 
 derive immense benefit by being placed in proper 
 relation to the central faculty of arts aud sciences, 
 and give back many benefits in turn. But no aggre- 
 gation of professional and technical schools makes a 
 real university, because such an aggregation lacks its 
 vital centre,, its faculty of arts and sciences, which 
 alone can maintain the universal standards of know- 
 ledge in all their exactness and rigor, and thus relate 
 and steady the particular standards of the several 
 professional and technical schools. 
 
 The liberal arts and sciences fall into two sec- 
 tions. The first or lower section is the undergradu- 
 ate college course of study, the one thing in our 
 higher education which is best worth preserving, for 
 this alone furnishes the best basis, which is always 
 
 G!FT 
 MRS. WOOD ROW WILSOM 4 
 
 NOV. 25, 1939 
 
desired, though not as yet generally taken, for sub- 
 sequent university study, whether of liberal or pro- 
 fessional character. So I need not argue in this pres- 
 ence that to preserve and develop the undergraduate 
 college education in its purest form is to do an indis- 
 pensable service to all forms of graduate study. 
 
 Let us turn at once to the graduate work and con- 
 fine our attention to the other section of the field of 
 liberal studies. Professional and technical studies 
 may in a sense be depended on to take care of them- 
 selves. They will always flourish so long as men are 
 seeking to be educated in order to make a profitable 
 living. But graduate work in liberal studies cannot 
 be maintained on this basis, because the end aimed at 
 is different. For if the pursuit of wealth or station 
 is the end aimed at by a man who thinks he is giving 
 himself to the life of a scholar, he is not aiming at a 
 scholarly end. Consequently, in order to maintain 
 its own standards, a true graduate school in the lib- 
 eral arts and sciences must depend on something else 
 to sustain it. The moment it becomes an employ- 
 ment bureau or an agency for finding places, a sordid 
 motive enters, and it is in danger of ceasing to be 
 a school devoted to the cause of truth and knowl- 
 edge. Unless, therefore, the life of the scholar is to 
 appeal to men not primarily as a means of livelihood, 
 but because they cannot help following the scholar's 
 life, we have no sufficient basis for justifying the 
 maintenance of this all-important school. And if 
 this school perishes or becomes degraded, you may 
 be very sure that sooner or later every valuable func- 
 tion of the university will be injured. 
 
 I suppose we can all accept heartily the state- 
 ment that the chief business of a university is to 
 
maintain standards, — to determine, inspect, and certify 
 the intellectual and moral weights and measures. I 
 do not doubt Ave can go farther and agree in asserting 
 that this maintenance of intellectual and moral stand- 
 ards is acutely needed in our own nation at this time 
 when its material interests are becoming so vast and 
 complex. And this, more than all else, is the pecul- 
 iar and pressing duty of every graduate school in 
 liberal studies. Here the higher teachers of the na- 
 tion are being trained. Here the influences which 
 make for truth and reason are or, at least, ought to 
 be most pure and uncontaminated. The service to 
 be rendered is priceless, the need is urgent, and the 
 fact that our graduate schools in liberal studies, pro- 
 perly planned and guided, are specially fitted to render 
 this service is the fact which justifies their existence. 
 
 It therefore becomes a matter of the first moment 
 for us that the standards of graduate work should be 
 maintained in as much purity as our means and intel- 
 ligence permit. We know they will not be perfect at 
 the best, but we also know that if we maintain them 
 at a lower level than we ought, even according to our 
 own imperfect conceptions of duty, there is nothing 
 to keep even our existing standards from deteriorat- 
 ing. The duty of self-criticism is therefore ever with 
 us, not only if we are to improve, but if we are to 
 keep what we have. I therefore ask you to look for 
 a little while at three aspects of this question of true 
 and false standards in graduate work, — namely, our 
 standards of knowledge, our standards of expres- 
 sion, and our standards of judgment. 
 
 i. The standards of knowledge in graduate 
 work are especially threatened just now by the antag- 
 onism of an unenlightened specialization. This is not 
 
 6 
 
only the curse of the specialization which does not 
 rest on a sound general education, but in a degree of 
 all specialization which does not limit the subdivision 
 of studies by some consideration of the intrinsic value 
 of the thing studied. What knowledge is of most 
 worth? is the fundamental question which tests 
 every graduate study and every graduate student, as 
 it does everyone who professes to be a thinker in any 
 field of knowledge at any stage of his life. It has 
 now become a very fair question whether the subdi- 
 vision of topics has not gone so far that not only the 
 perception of relative values is clouded, but even the 
 community of intellectual interests among our higher 
 students is being destroyed. Certainly many of our 
 scholars seem to be subjects of some petty principal- 
 ity rather than freemen in the commonwealth of 
 knowledge. 
 
 It is a matter of common remark that many of 
 our rising students in science are only too ignorant 
 of literature, many philosophers ignorant of science, 
 and many literary men ignorant of both. But this is 
 not the full extent of the trouble. Many men, 
 whether in science or philosophy or literature or his- 
 tory, are unacquainted with and utterly uninterested 
 in either science or philosophy or literature or history 
 as a whole. We may subdivide still more and find 
 that one philosopher is a logician only, one scientific 
 man a biologist only, and some other scholar a class- 
 ical philologist only. Would that we could stop here. 
 But we must go on until we discover that there are 
 many who are familiar only with some subdivision of 
 a division of their logic or biology or philology. 
 They may be known by two characteristics : The first 
 is their intensive knowledge of a small portion of 
 
some subject, which is all very well, and the second 
 is their extensive ignorance of everything outside that 
 small portion of their subject, which is not well at 
 all. How vividly it brings out the point of Mon- 
 taigne's satirical story. As he rode across the plain 
 one morning, he encountered a company of gentlemen 
 and said to them " Good morning, Messieurs," and the 
 leader of the company sharply replied " We are not 
 Messieurs. My friend here is a grammarian and I am 
 a logician." Were these worthy scholars living to- 
 day, perhaps they would not be able to profess even 
 so much. The one would likely be a student of some 
 little part of syntax and the other the exploiter of a 
 mechanical device for grinding out some special re- 
 sults of the use of the syllogism. This again may be 
 well enough, provided the specialist is not making it the 
 end of his intellectual life, provided he constantly 
 realizes that the only valuable specialization lies in 
 studying the general in the particular, and that the 
 relating of an accurately determined particular to the 
 general is the only thing which gives the results of 
 specialized study their place and shows their size in 
 the body of valuable knowledge. We are not object- 
 ing to specialization — far from it, — but solely to the 
 study of the unimportant. And this may take many 
 forms. It may take the form of investigating some- 
 thing which, when ascertained, is found to be a trifle. 
 Or it may take the form of solemnly proving the ob- 
 vious by an elaborate array of statistics, as when we 
 are shown conclusively by tables of percentages, 
 which have been tested and re-tested, that a given 
 number of children born and bred in the city, com- 
 pared with the same number born and bred in the 
 country, show less knowledge of the different kinds 
 
of plants, grains, birds and beasts than do their rural 
 compeers. Of the same nature is the proof 1 read 
 recently, showing minutely and beyond the shadow 
 of a doubt that in the domain of " child psychology " 
 there was a marked distinction between the preferen- 
 ces of young boys and girls for animal pets, more 
 girls than boys preferring birds, and that unkindness 
 or cruelty to an animal was from thirty to fifty per 
 cent, more shocking to a girl than to a boy. Does 
 one need to pursue higher university studies in order 
 to know this? 
 
 A force which is always operating to increase 
 the perplexities of the situation is the mania for pub- 
 lication. It is assumed that production of original 
 results, published so all may have a chance to read 
 and test them, is a necessary mark of the higher 
 scholarship. Pressure is therefore constantly felt by 
 the aspiring young candidate to justify himself in the 
 eyes of other scholars in this way. Our embryo 
 Doctors of Philosophy must write and print a disser- 
 tation. This again is very well, if the man who is 
 writing the dissertation has a sensible mind and is 
 writing about something that needs to be made known. 
 But what has come to pass? Another deluge! The 
 number of reviews, scattered articles and contribu- 
 tions of every sort in any one great subject, such as 
 biology, or history, or chemistry, or classics, is so 
 great that it is doubtful whether any human being 
 can read in ten years the output in any one of these 
 subjects for one year. The vast mass of publications 
 is piling up unsifted, unorganized, and therefore un- 
 available to a large extent for future use. It reminds 
 us a little of what Carlyle said about the voluminous 
 archives of the French Revolution: "The French 
 
Revolution consists of some tons of manuscript slowly 
 rotting in the European libraries." 
 
 The menace to our standards of knowledge of- 
 fered by intemperate specialization is thus increased 
 by a false notion as to what scholarly productivity is. 
 It consists not only in the advancement of knowledge, 
 but in the diffusion of knowledge, and, above all, it 
 consists primarily in the advancement and diffusion of 
 the more valuable knowledge. And, in passing, let 
 us ask how anyone can fail to see that the question 
 whether a certain body of knowledge is new or old 
 has in itself nothing to do with the question of rela- 
 tive values. Furthermore, in the forming of a great 
 scholar by the close personal touch of his master 
 there is a far nobler form of productivity than the 
 writing of even an important dissertation. As a rule, 
 the best "collected works" a scholar can leave is a 
 group of great students. In the light of such con- 
 siderations, is it not clear that the entirety of our 
 standards of knowledge is being menaced? The pure 
 white light is being broken into the many beams that 
 compose it, and many there are who see not even so 
 much as one whole color, but only some one hue of 
 that color in the great spectrum. The clear organi- 
 zation and evaluation of the knowledge we now have 
 seems at the present time of more importance than 
 all the stray advances hither and thither. 
 
 Our standards of knowledge therefore need to 
 be centered in the general body of ascertained truth. 
 We must take our position, in the words of Francis 
 Bacon, that "philosophy and universality are not 
 idle studies," and we must carry this so far as to be- 
 lieve that only in the light of the universal shall we 
 understand the worth and bearing of the particular. 
 
And as the only available practical help towards 
 securing this attitude of mind in our graduate stu- 
 dents, we must insist on a clear and pure preliminary 
 training in liberal college studies, followed by such a 
 training in their graduate work as constantly keeps 
 them in touch with the community of intellectual in- 
 terests outside their special field of study. And to 
 secure this in turn we should aim to secure as grad- 
 uate students only men of strong, all-round ability, 
 open vision and wide sympathies. In short we must, 
 first of all, secure the right kind of man as a gradu- 
 ate student. Having done this, we may rest assured 
 that all other desirable results may be made to follow. 
 2. When the harmonious standards of general 
 knowledge are lost sight of, particular standards 
 suited to one or another specialty are apt to take 
 their place. Partly as a result of this, there comes a 
 corresponding change in the standards of expression. 
 When the broad view is lost, simplicity and universal- 
 ity of statement, and a consequent attractiveness and 
 beauty of presentation, are apt to suffer. It is not 
 enough that a book or dissertation in the field of 
 scholarship be accurate and painstaking, if it is to 
 survive in the recollection of men. As we review in 
 thought the books and papers which have made a 
 mark on the intellectual life of any period, it is easy 
 to see that many able contributions to knowledge have 
 passed into oblivion because they were not engaging 
 and readable, whereas one of the distinctive marks of 
 the finest class of such compositions is their convin- 
 cing charm of style. These are the classics of sci- 
 ence and philosophy, as well as of literature. A 
 scientific writer who has the artist's sense has thus 
 an advantage over his equally able rival, and some- 
 
times over his abler rival, who lacks this sense. Now 
 one of the most evident faults of the mass of special- 
 ized publications which now occupy the main place 
 in our literature of scholarship is a sort of solemn 
 pedantry. This springs from the entire subordina- 
 tion of the writer to his restricted theme, and to the 
 particular technique of language which belongs to 
 his specialty. He does not dominate his subject, 
 but is mastered by it. He therefore writes too much 
 in a dialect, and not in a literary way. He becomes 
 dry and lifeless. Of course every subject and every 
 subdivision of a subject has its own furniture of ideas 
 and must make use of the technical words which 
 alone set forth these ideas accurately. But this has 
 been fearfully overdone. If it sufficed a Newton to 
 define the elusive atom — whether rightly or wrongly 
 is of no importance here — as " the least part of mat- 
 ter, ought we not to take courage from his example 
 and insist that technical terms, except when neces- 
 sary, and highly formal language, and in fact all 
 forms of swollen diction, be excluded from the schol- 
 ar's writing. The difficulty of the ideas is sufficient 
 without enveloping them in a fog of words. Let us 
 somehow manage to keep the common store of pure 
 English as the one treasury to which we resort for 
 everything common English words can express. In 
 this way alone shall we be able to preserve a general 
 reading interest which will steadily connect the pub- 
 lications in one department of knowledge with the 
 publications in another. Descartes has said that 
 clearness is a test of truth. Without going so far as 
 to reverse this and to assert that obscurity of state- 
 ment is evidence of error, we may at least use the 
 maxim as a warning to all men who are prone to 
 write in a formidable technical dialect. 
 
One other thing may be said in this connection : 
 Pretentiousness of any sort is unscholarly, whether 
 it be in the form of conceit as to the value of one's 
 own thoughts or in the form of grave pedantry in 
 proclaiming them to others. And, lastly, on this 
 point it may be asserted that the man who is a slave 
 to a technical terminology is in constant danger of 
 getting away from the concrete truth of what he is 
 studying into a region of artificial construction, 
 where he is so much occupied with the scaffolding 
 and outer appliances that he mistakes work on these 
 for work on the real building. 
 
 3. Back of all standards of knowledge and ex- 
 pression in the scholar's life lie his standards of judg- 
 ment. On these, more than on anything else, depend 
 the genuineness and permanence of what he does. 
 We may leave geniuses aside in this discussion, be- 
 cause there is no use or need of legislation for them, 
 and after all they are very few in number, supreme 
 as their distinction is. And yet, even in the case of 
 geniuses, we shall find more instances of sound com- 
 mon sense than might be expected. But what of the 
 mass of scholars? What is to be the ultimate guar- 
 antee to mankind generally that their work is intrin- 
 sically valuable, whether it be brilliant or plain, ex- 
 tensive or limited, commanding or humble? Faraday 
 somewhere writes that the education of the judgment 
 is the chief benefit of a scientific training, and Hux- 
 ley has told us that scientific ability in its last analy- 
 sis is nothing less and nothing else than " trained 
 common sense." How this throws us back on the 
 personality of the man whom we are to encourage 
 to be a graduate student ! It thus becomes primarily 
 the question not of what he can know, how he can 
 
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express it, or how much he can do, but what kind of 
 a man he is. The reasonings and conclusions of a 
 vain man will be tinged with vanity. The judgments 
 of a man " deep versed in books, but shallow in him- 
 self," will not permanently appeal to the respect of 
 his fellow men. The capricious or adventurous or 
 self-advertising scholar is, so far forth, not a true 
 scholar. The fate of our higher studies, in their 
 effect on the men we influence, depends first of all 
 on what kind of men we are. The kind of scholar 
 any man is to become, so far as the abiding value of 
 his influence goes, is determined in the last resort 
 not so much by what he knows or says as by what 
 he believes and loves. He must have the lover's in- 
 stinct, almost the art of divination. Like the miner, 
 he must have the eye that knows the ores of gold 
 from fool's gold. The student who naturally longs 
 to know the things of most worth, and searches for 
 them in all simplicity and sincerity, and purposes to 
 turn all to the best account by making his acquire- 
 ments accessible and serviceable to his fellowmen, is 
 the only kind of man who ought to be encouraged to 
 enter our graduate schools. And this kind of man 
 is most naturally bred in the comradeship of our col- 
 lege life and in the atmosphere of liberal studies. 
 What a mistake to fail in any way to make our grad- 
 uate schools supremely attractive to just this sort of 
 man. Given the personal qualities indicated and a 
 suitable college training, and on top of this a life in 
 graduate studies environed by the friendships that 
 arise from the constant interchange of ideas between 
 men studying in different departments of knowledge, 
 how can the young scholar, so circumstanced, fail to 
 develop that "trained common sense," that well- 
 
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poised judgment which must enlighten all his think- 
 ing and all his doing if he is to be the scholar we are 
 describing. 
 
 It has often been debated whether the theoretical 
 or the practical mind is the higher type. If the 
 terms are used in their proper sense, it seems to me 
 there can be only one answer: The practical mind is 
 the better, because sound judgment, which is essen- 
 tial to all sane scholarship, is an eminently practical 
 thing. It is this that transforms knowledge into wis- 
 dom. The brilliant theoretical scholar, without this 
 balance, is structurally weak. But let us not misun- 
 derstand what this practical mind is. It is not cut 
 off from theory. In fact the highest practical schol- 
 ars are those most deeply grounded in theoretical 
 knowledge. But they differ from the merely theoreti- 
 cal scholars in being able to use that knowledge 
 steadily in applying it to the best advantage, and 
 consequently the man who is a practical scholar in 
 this sense is the only one who unites the best traits 
 of the theoretical and practical mind. So when we 
 see men of flighty judgment, erratic purposes, and 
 unsteady effort, let us keep them out of our graduate 
 schools as surely as we keep out the drone or ought 
 to keep out the dullard. 
 
 At this time, more than ever before, business and 
 professional life, with their attractive careers and 
 dazzling rewards, are taking most of the able men of 
 the conntry. The attractions of the scholar's life 
 are not relatively as great as they were a generation 
 ago, nor is the honor paid to the scholar so great in 
 our land as in the older civilizations of Great Britain, 
 France and Germany, And yet on the little band of 
 scholars in the liberal arts and sciences depends, more 
 
 15 
 
than ever before, the tone of our nation in things in- 
 tellectual and moral. We have already too many 
 second-rate and third-rate and fourth-rate men among 
 our scholars. We shall never be short of these. 
 But on our graduate schools in the liberal studies 
 rests the supreme privilege and duty of standing 
 more resolutely than ever for the best standards of 
 knowledge, expression and judgment, so that the 
 small company of picked men who are best fitted by 
 reason of their high manhood to become our best 
 scholars will naturally resort to our graduate schools 
 and lift them, and with them the higher American 
 scholarship, to a level never attained before. And 
 may we live to see that day ! 
 
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