XIII

The University and its Service to
Business

By Evans Woollen1

THE public school authorities in Indianapolis did me the honor some years ago of inviting me as a man of business to address their principals in answer to the question: How can the schools best fit their pupils for business? And that gave opportunity to express the conviction that the best thing the schools could do for business would be to leave off the effort to fit their pupils for business; the conviction that if only the schools would fit their pupils for life we men of business better than they could do the rest.

Is there a similar answer to the same question about the university which is a part of the public school system and as such expected in a measure to set the standards and to be in adjustment with and take over the products of the rest of the system?

The answer by the business man of to-day cannot be in a spirit of criticism. Rather it must be in a spirit

1 Evans Woollen is President of the Fletcher Savings and Trust Company of Indianapolis. His address, which is here reprinted, was delivered at Indiana University and was published in the Indiana University Centennial Memorial Volume. It is a statement, noteworthy for its directness, of the demand of the business world for sound, fundamental, liberal training as opposed to the many vocational fads which are so popular at the present time.-EDITOR.

of appreciation of the endeavor to give business what it needs. A difficulty in the way of the endeavor has been that business, especially the kind that is fond of asserting "business is business," has not always known just what it did need. It has not always known that it needed whole men and it has demanded of the university that which it called practical education. And what shall we now say that business does most need in the youth it takes from the university? My answer with reference to the university as to the schools is that business, that great field of infinitely varied activity, needs several things more than it needs vocational training. First, of course, it needs character. And then, equally of course, it needs the capacity to think with concentration and precision. Health may well come next, health that brings to the service of business vigor and vitality. If to these is added the habit of work then nothing else much matters.

In saying that business needs character in the youth it takes over I do not think so much of the more simple and obvious things having to do with right and wrong, for they go without saying, at least without emphasis. Rather and beyond I think especially of generous-mindedness that comes with the habit of accommodation, the habit of trying tolerantly, sympathetically to understand the other man's point of view and to be respectful of his personality. Character in this sense business needs that it may get on in the solution of its problems having to do with human relations. These are the problems that trouble business to-day and are greatly more important than problems having to do with things.

Now this generous-mindedness is the result, is it not, of the process we speak of rather vaguely as liberating the spirit. We mean, I take it, liberation of the spirit from the little view, emancipation from prejudice against the other man and his cause. The clash in the world to-day is the clash of unliberated spirits and business is suffering in that clash.

Here is an illustration. The general manager of a great industrial concern recently expressed an opinion that has support among those whose whole. philosophy of life is in the phrase "law and order." The opinion was that for Socialism as for Bolshevism there is, to quote his words, "but one antidote, namely, governmental initiative to protect life and property." Now that business man, vocationally trained but uneducated, honest but unacquainted with the truth, informed but unliberated, knows all about motor cars but little about human relations. He understands well the sacredness of property but perhaps not as well the sacredness of life that produces property. The implication of his words is that force. is the answer to any questioning of our capitalistic organization of society. Well, if we had no other answer we should be in a bad way. Government can put out the socialist but it cannot put down Socialism. That is the task of people who think clearly and accept the Golden Rule. Indeed, the answers to all the restless questionings will come not so much from those who know nothing beyond "law and order" as from the generous-minded. The problems that trouble business in these clashing times and frighten the general manager whose business suffers in the clash will be solved by those of liberated spirit

and they are those whom business most needs from the university.

How the university can best accomplish the process of liberation is not for the business man to say, but of this I am sure it is not accomplished when the vocational motive is dominant, when information is the aim and not wisdom, when things of the imagination are omitted, when acquaintance with the noble of history and fiction is foregone. In a word, it is not accomplished by a curriculum determined with reference to pocket-filling practicality, with reference to the "successful career" of a certain type whereof we have had more than enough. Moreover, the process of liberation does not require the curriculum extended "over the whole field of knowledge" to which President Pritchett recently referred as having enormously diluted college salaries. And in this connection it is interesting to note President Thwing's statement that curriculum extension in the last seventy-five years has been greater than during all the centuries theretofore since Oxford and Cambridge began to receive students. The process we are considering does require that "discipline of the spirit" which Lord Haldane defines in his Yale Review article as coming "from the sustained effort to understand and assimilate the teaching of the great masters in literature, science, art, and religion. He includes science as he must, it being an important part of "the life history of the human spirit and its wonderful adventures," and in a curriculum fit to accomplish the liberation of the spirit there is a place for science as Iwell as for the so-called humanities, but for pure science, for science taught not in application only but

philosophically, so taught that the things learned are, quoting from the same article, "not ends in themselves but the milestones which mark progress toward liberation."

And then, next to character, business needs in the youth it takes over from the university the capacity to think with concentration and precision, capacity for the clear thinking that is helped and proved by clear expression. It needs clear-thinking youth for the long pull more than it needs vocationally trained youth with their temporary advantage. There is no great difficulty for the manager in training to the established ways of the business the boys who have had to quit school. The difficulty is in getting the youth who can think out new ways for the business, whose minds go hither and yon with precision; who, as the saying is, can get their worlds "charted and mapped." They are the youth business wants from the university. It cannot get them from the correspondence school or the business college. It wants the university to train its youth not so much to do “a certain set of things" as to infuse "the way of doing all things with a certain ideal" of clearthinking precision. Business, in a word, needs not so much a smattering of facts as the power to co-ordinate facts; needs not so much the stuffed man as the adaptable; needs not so much him who knows as him who thinks for "the thinker," as it has been said, "takes the old truth and applies it to the new conditions of the present and of the future."

Here again it is not for the business man to say that this method or that is the best for use by the university in the development of the capacity for