Variety
Report from the Academy:
The Professor as Manager
W
HEN
ouR impatience with the
. academicians becomes heat–
ed beyond a certain degree, we
ought to pause and remind our–
selves that the professor is a prim–
ordial human type, that (as Peda–
gogue or Pedant) he harks back
to the very dawn of comedy and
satire, that, indeed, in his inner–
most essence, he certainly harks
back farther than that-back to
the dimmest early millennia of our
life as a species. We may
be
sure
that, in every sense but the literal
one, there were professors in the
Pala:olithic (Paul Radin has practi–
cally proved it), and that, let us
say in the Magdalenian, the pari–
etal artists who painted the great
bison and reindeer were regarded
by the professors of that era with
the familiar mingling of envy, sus–
picion and dislike: these latter cer–
tainly looked upon the painters in
question as "unsound" and "errat–
ic" fellows, however "brilliant."
All this is true, but it is also true
that the type Professor has its acci–
dents as well as its essence, and
that, like the other great perma–
nent genera, the pedant has
be–
decked himself, from age to age,
from scene to scene, with the gar–
ments of his climate, his class, his
"moment." The American aca–
demic type that emerged in the
period between the two wars, and
is now everywhere ascendant and
authoritative, is still at heart our
ancient ally, the Pedagogue, but
on the surface
one doubts whether
Horace or Rabelais or even Flau–
bert would quite recognize him.
He belongs to an age when, what–
ever one may feel about the phrase,
something like a Managerial Rev–
olution has quietly taken place,
and he trims his clothes to the cut
prescribed by that fateful process.
Hollywood, so far as I know, has
not yet discovered the professor as
Salesman, as Manager, as Execu–
tive, but that is due only to the
familiar "lag"
in
the mentality of
the studios: the movies will catch
up with reality in due season.
There once were professors of
something like the Hollywood
brand, and the fact is that the
American scholar has passed
through as many phases as the so–
cial history of the country itself.
The earliest schoolmen, in the col–
onies, were either ministers or men
who had all the outward earmarks
of the ministerial type. At a later
stage, in the days of Ezra Stiles
and John Witherspoon, the schol–
ar was very likely to turn
philoso–
phe,
pamphleteer, and patriot, to
sign petitions and to introduce res–
olutions. During most of the nine–
teenth century he assumed the stig–
mata either of the mercantile gen–
try (Silliman, Longfellow,
J.
D.
Dana) or of the plantation pluto–
cracy (Maury and LeConte). We
even had, during the age of Grant,
our robber barons of scholarship:
