It is my experience that the professors themselves are getting thoroughly tired of the overorganization and intellectual aimlessness of our modern educational institutions. To a great extent they themselves are caught in the mill. I think that America is the only civilized country in the world where what a man does counts for so much more than what he is, and where the general public, having no cultural standard by which to judge what a man is, takes as the basis of appraisal solely the visible signs of what presumably he has “done.” A college degree has come to have a perfectly absurd value in the eyes of the public, not only in regard to the graduates of an institution, but in connection with the teaching staff. It is practically impossible for a man who has not obtained his Ph.D. label to progress far in teaching as a profession. I cannot imagine any leading European university, such as Oxford, Cambridge or the Sorbonne, caring in the slightest whether a man who was otherwise qualified to teach within its halls had any degree at all, but every little picayune college or “university” of the fifteen hundred or more scattered over the United States has been seized with the Ph.D. mania. A member of the faculty of one of the oldest institutions in the country, who receives many requests from southern and western colleges for suitable men to teach on their staffs, told me that the one sine qua non on which they all insisted in their applications was that the candidate must have received his Doctor’s degree. Otherwise, no matter how well educated, how brilliant intellectually, how good a teacher, the door was closed to him. A year or two ago I was talking with a very successful[Pg 152] teacher of English literature in a prominent school for girls. She had only an A.B. but was soon, after many years’ work, to have her sabbatical year. With sound instinct she wished to spend that year in England, becoming more familiar with the background of her subject, browsing as she wished among the masterpieces of the literature, and, at the end, bringing back to her pupils a wider knowledge, a deeper insight, and a freshened enthusiasm. But, no. She had reached the limit of salary to which she could ever attain with only an A.B., and therefore she felt it necessary to spend the year in the soul-killing routine of taking “English courses” at an American university to obtain an A.M. According to the American educational system, there was never a question of what she was, of what she could give to her pupils, of how, for their sake and her own, she could best spend that precious year outside the schoolroom, but of what tangible label she could wear, indicating to parents what she had “done.” The pages of school and college catalogues listing the faculty must be scattered over with degrees, or the institution is suspect.