TIME AND THE UNIVERSITY

An Address by Alan Gregg
Director, The Medical Sciences
The Rockefeller Foundation

HEN on such occasions as this we celebrate the fiftieth anniver-

sary of a medical school, we can perhaps wisely attempt that most
difficult yet most surprising of all explorations, the exploration of
the familiar, a pilgrimage in search of new meanings that lie implicit
in what has always been around us-yet all too often escaped recog-
nition. If it be true that strangers have the power to make the
commonplace seem strange, then to match your welcome invitation
and your delightful hospitality I'll play the stranger. So for a few
moments at least I shall try to do what's rare and risky in the West,
examine the present and immediate circumstance of our lives.

I remember that in my childhood in Colorado Springs at the foot
of Pike's Peak, there was a picture in our living room of the Cornish
coast. a picture that to me was one of unerring and declared beauty.
Colorado scenery all about me was quite as beautiful but it was all
but overlooked. No one had declared it beautiful except for commer-
cial purposes, heartlessly. No artist I can remember, unless perhaps
Frederick Remington, had begun to present to Westerners the life of
the West for what it was. And even today the sense of the reality
about us is still somewhat lacking, perhaps I should admit inevitably
lacking, because we haven't produced enough artists, philosophers
or perhaps mere travelers-at any rate enough men who have
escaped the provincialism of time as well as of space-persons who
can react vividly to the present because they can contrast it with the
past, who can sense the ephemeral because they have had glimpses
of the things that endure.

3

Perhaps I should warn you that in this talk I am going to speak
of higher education of all kinds, not merely medical education. This
I shall do because it is part of the plight of medical education that
it has become segregated from the rest of the university, even to the
point of being feared as a parasite that threatens the strength of the
university. There is no likelihood of saying too often that medical
education is a form of education. Furthermore, the problems of
medical education are so engrossing that many of us ignore the
framework in which these problems can best be understood-the
framework of higher education in a changing world.

I set myself the task of commenting upon American universities
in the light of having seen a good many universities in other parts
of the world. You will agree with me that this is a curious essay, of
necessity incomplete in plan and piecemeal in accomplishment. No
one could be more aware than I of my limitations for I accept com-
pletely the implicit as well as the explicit meaning of Oscar Wilde's
observation that "all criticism is a form of autobiography." My life
hardly qualifies me to criticize. None the less, attempts at appraisal
are needed, not so much as guides for the future as in the hope that
you all may in some measure try to appraise your handiwork-the
future of this University. For here in the West we are pouring
concrete, literally and figuratively we are pouring concrete. We are
setting the forms and forming the lines not for fifty but for five
hundred years of civilization in this great valley.  It behooves us to
find each for himself the significance of what he is doing or failing
to do.

THE first element of American university life that needs to be
brought into sharper relief and given a different value is the impor-
tance of time. We Americans regard time as an enemy: it can be
used as an ally. Time is a considerable matter. Admiral Cunning-
ham, as Churchill reports, decided at the risk of losing ships to go
on with the rescue of the British Army from Crete. He said, "It
takes the Navy three years to build a new ship.  It will take three
hundred years to build a new tradition.  The evacuation will con-
tinue." If you believe that in human relationships tradition can be
singularly powerful, then time is a considerable matter. Among the
arts, music, which is infused with tempo, timing, cadence and
rhythm, provides a better analogy by which to understand the uni-

4

versity than painting with its almost static elements of pattern,
design, composition and color. Young people, in the intricate pro-
cess of becoming, not merely being, pass through the university.
They are passing through phases: the process of maturing depends
on the timing of experiences. Instruction is offered them in deliber-
ate planned sequences. Even their teachers, it may be at least hoped,
are still and steadily growing and changing. And if at the worst the
professors are no longer changing, then the contrast their teaching
presents to what it should be begins to grow, producing a steadily
increasing strain on the university's justification for existence and
support. In universities it is as important to ask, What is the story?
as it is to ask, What is the set-up?
Nor does the analogy to music cease with a reference to students
snd teachers. The university itself has its own history to make. At
what tempo is it reasonable for a school fifty years old to change
and grow? It keeps forever unfolding with variations and develop-
ments of its original motifs or themes developed later in an elaborate
and all but unending symphony. Is not the major difference between
evolution and revolution a matter of tempo? We speak of "giving
me time to turn round in." I never fail to experience a sense of
the mysterious flow of time when I walk in the Quartier Latin where
without a day's cessation for eight hundred years have walked
students and teachers, their studies and their horizons slowly but
constantly changing and their youth and their general purposes
forever renewed. Universities have their own unending flow, based,
as they are, on the inextinguishable desire of succeeding generations
of parents to give to their children, and on the inexhaustible curiosity
of an unending succession of those who are young in spirit; students
becoming teachers.

ONE aspect of the development of the American university de-
serves more reflection than I have seen accorded it. As part of the
story of the American university it explains much of the present.
The preeursor of the American university was the American college:
from this college grew the university, and from the college the
university took a leitmotiv of singular importance.  The American
college was not, like the European university, a spontaneous segre-
gation of scholarly minds in an established feudal society.  The
American college was usually and characteristically a means of pro-

5

ducing teachers and preachers as soon and as many as possible for
a rapidly growing colonial society. It was so frequently denomi-
national in origin and support as to justify the assumption that its
leitmotiv was religious and social rather than purely intellectual.
True, the European universities were for hundreds of years con-
trolled by religious authorities but that control came only after the
Church discovered how powerful was the universitas studiorum in
shaping contemporary thought.  It was, as I think, quite natural
that the idea of scholarship and respect for individual originality
of mind was and still is taken for granted more easily in the Euro-
pean university than in the American college, or, to press the point
home, in the American university that grew out of the American
college.

Two illustrations of the European attitude will perhaps convey
this point. It was, I believe, Otto Warburg who told me that if a
German professor of histology wished to devote most of the budget
of his institute to the housing and feeding of an elephant from which
he could take occasional snips of tissue for study or experiment, the
comment of his university colleagues would be to the effect that he
must be a clever and original man from whom something important
may well be expected. There would be no censure or objection to
so unusual a procedure in disregard of teaching duties. Or another
example of an attitude practically unknown in this country: only
last October I talked with a European professor who exclaimed with
some vehemence, "I don't understand all this talk about `education'
nowadays. What has the university to do with education? Education
is the task of the primary and secondary schools. The university
exists for Truth and a student can well count himself lucky to be
privileged to hear professors explaining their views out loud.  It is
the student's opportunity to learn but surely it is not the professor's
obligation to see to it that the student does learn.  For then where
could the test of a student's independence, originality, curiosity and
earnestness be found? No, I don't understand all this talk about
education. In my day we went to the university to learn, not to be
taught." Or one more example of the European attitude that
Lawrence Henderson told me: a French historian, having written
some excellent volumes on the Middle Ages, was given a chair in
the Collige de France. Arriving in Paris from his home in the south
of France, he inquired from another professor at the CollZge what
were the expected and traditional duties of a professor at the Colkge

6

de France. The reply was "Ask the janitor. He knows what lecture
rooms will be available to you and at what hours.  For it is the
tradition of the CollGge de France to assume that a professor knows
better than anyone else what he may best offer students out of the
results of his work as a savant." I might add that the CollGge de
France was not closed at the time of the French Revolution since
it was not by tradition involved in indoctrination as was the Univer-
sity of Paris,-which was closed by the revolutionaries.

1 HOPE that these stories convey some measure of the ways in which
the European university tradition contrasts with the American. Pos-
sibly the difference could be made still sharper by a story or two
from my experience in this country. Not many years ago I asked
the president of one of our leading schools of technology what fore-
cast he could make for the top ten of each year's graduating class.
He showed immediate concern at the question to which he had
already devoted a good deal of attention because the records showed
that the subsequent careers of the men graduating with the highest
marks fell far sort of fulfilling the expectations one could naturally
have formed. "I think the reason lies in this fact," the president
said, "Our courses, though they are stiff, are rigid or inelastic in
the sense that our teachers' efforts are devoted to students who are
getting D's and E's. Students getting A's are left alone,  Now the
school has each year about a dozen really gifted students capable of
getting A's without working very hard and so they graduate without
ever learning the one thing that has most to do with success in
later life; namely, the importance of driving yourself up to the limit
of your abilities. Our brightest men all too often leave the school
without ever having learned that lesson." Now in my judgment that
story illustrates a characteristic of American institutions : the pro-
fessors' preoccupation with the needs of his whole class of students.
Graduating whole classes of students, rather than adding to knowl-
edge, has been our longest tradition. The students are assumed to
have the right of way. The American university continues the
assumptions and the axioms of the denominational college; namely,
to graduate steadily classes of students not below a certain standard
for positions in a growing population that needs such services as
they are thus prepared to give. As in assembly-line manufacture, the
higher educational institutions examine for, and correct if possible,

7

defects in the product as it passes through. Excellence receives no
special attention: it simply passes muster. There is no obligation
to exploit or refine individual excellences. When the whole assembly-
line organization gets big enough and busy enough, there is no
time to discover or explore unexpected individual excellence.  The
policy begins and ends with the belief that each student must have
equality of opportunity: the opportunity must be equal to any other
student's opportunity, not equal to his own abilities.

Curiously enough it is in athletics and extra-curricular activities
that attention is paid to excellence. It is the students, not the teach-
ers, who set the example of expecting, without attempting to define
in advance,-simply expecting the optimum performance from those
who are gifted. I venture to think that football could be eliminated
from any university if it were a required course, marks were given
and the coaches gave their special efforts to the worst players: as
the professors do in most of the college classes.

-_

T HE devotion of our teachers to the task of helping the weak and
shepherding the stragglers cDmes, as I think, directly from the relig-
ious motive of the Good Samaritan. If this be true, it has some note-
worthy implications. If teaching is a religious duty, then a teacher's
salary can be set as much below his worth as his religious devotion
can endure. I remember that in my boyhood the professor of mathe-
matics and astronomy in a denominational college (whose prepara-
tory academy I attended) had a salary of $1,300. He also had five
children. One summer his wife's father died. His wife inherited
thereupon property that provided      of $500. The president
of the college promptly advised t       r that since God in His
wisdom and kindliness had        the college could only
supply $800 as salary in          I may use a phrase not
quite appropriate to the r         bnegation, the president
got away with it. Some of you may    that I am a very old man
to remember an event so far removed from the salary policies now
in vogue. But most of you know perfectly well that in terms of their
purchasing power American university salaries have long been a
reproach in comparison with European and are now the most serious
threat to the future of higher education in this land.

Even if university teaching has looked to the modesty and self-
sacrifice of serving God in a denominational college as providing the

8

model of salary levels, I would see no ultimate wisdom in assuming
that those who serve God should therefore and naturally be under-
paid. Furthermore, we should do well to remember that when our
colleges were training only teachers and preachers, the students
could look forward to earning no more than their teachers.  But
today our universities in their schools of medicine, law, business and
engineering are preparing students for work that is paid far better
than the work of their professors.

In short, the tradition of the denominational college persists in
the assumption that teaching, being akin to piety, need not be ade-
quately recompensed this side of Heaven, and in the other curious
assumption that professors have a moral duty to devote their energies
to providing not less than a minimum of equal opportunity to a
maximum of students. Can anyone wonder at the consternation
among faculties imbued with these traditions, when it is announced
that promotion and tenure will depend upon productive scholarship ?
Or the despairing bewilderment of the students when their teachers
turn under such pressure to add to knowledge instead of injecting
known facts into the expectant student body?

T HERE seems to me to be wide-spread misunderstanding between
faculty and students in our professional schools. College graduates
come to the medical school naively supposing that their premedical
courses have prepared them for the medical school. But, poor lambs,
the transition is quite an unexpected affair.  In our best schools the
transition is a radical change of method, of attitude and approach.
It is not a gradual increase in mere facts to be memorized in the
same old way. It is a change of intellectual climate. I often have
wondered whether any program could be invented that would be
more likely to dull curiosity, subdue originality, discourage initiative
and penalize independence than four high school years of memoriz-
ing abstractions without much of any direct motivation and with
rewards that are neither prompt nor particularly pleasurable. And
this is followed by four college years of tactical drill in subjects
taught in the convoy tempo (i.e., not much faster than the slowest
boat) and with no responsibility for deciding what to learn or in
what order or how or when or where to learn it, or when to stop
learning more of one subject in order to have some time for some-
thing else. Eight years! Eight years during which all studies and

9

most major decisions concerned are at second hand-via a teacher-
while sports, dances, club life, vacations, most of the rest of living
is at first hand. And in the medical school we expect the students
to become all of a sudden realists and tell us teachers what they
see and hear and feel and think. Why, they have hardly been en-
couraged to convey a simple, original, direct observation to a teacher
since kindergarten days. Poor things!

Now peculiar or unsatisfactory conduct in others occurs oftenest
when they are under pressures we know not of, or when they are
making assumptions that once were sound but no longer obtain.
That is why I suggest that the semi-religious flavor of higher educa-
tion in America deserves to be examined in the light of present
realities. I do not mean that it should be condemned. But it should
be understood: its defects are numerous and serious but its strengths
have been and could continue to be extraordinary were we but to
understand them.

T HE lasting strength of the private university in America is con-
viction shared by teachers, trustees, alumni and students.  Without
such conviction the budget will swiftly pre-empt the focus of atten-
tion, or what one might fancifully describe as the edifice complex
will exert its baleful influence in exciting jealousy and so destroy
the morale of the teaching force." We have become used to reading
of the accomplishments of a retiring university president in terms of
buildings erected during his regime, of increases in student atten-
dance, and of increases in endowment. None of these items requires
much discernment. Why do we rest content with information so easy
to comprehend and so dangerous to be impressed by? We know that
the great university president is to be measured by his personal
integrity, by the degree to which by example and by articulate state-
ment he is able to convince his trustees, his faculty and the students
of the wisdom and generosity of his convictions, and by the quality
of persons brought by him to the service of the university.  Intan-
gibles, you may say, but since when has the value of higher education
depended on tangibles? Because university presidents cannot pos-
sibly do all these things alone, it seems to me that shared conviction
or moral solidarity must be admitted to be the ultimate power of

* You will recall the definition of a zealot a5 a person who redoubles his

efforts when he has lost sight of his aim.

10

a university. Money alone will not secure it: quite the converse, it
alone can, and frequently does, secure money. Time and sequences
and timing are important in the life of a university because they are
essential to produce conviction and solidarity.  The self-confidence
that conviction engenders, assures the university community its
greatest opportunity and its greatest strength.  It takes time to con-
vince people and especially to convince them of the value of toler-
ance, of suspending hasty judgments and of the obligations as well
as the rights of academic freedom.

0 NE cannot think of conviction and institutional morale without
realizing that our forerunners in the early American colleges oper-
ated on the basis of denominational conviction that was often more
powerful than a mere thirst for knowledge. Between mere clannish
rivalries and doctrinal convictions I have never felt that I could
easily distinguish. But it is evident that in a small college, denomi-
national loyalties can survive, and have survived, more consistently
than in a large university. Indeed, it seems that one of the principal
tasks of the modern American university is to become as sure of its
mission as was the college, to discover and develop convictions that
will be important enough and deep enough and clear enough to knit
the whole institution into a harmonious and unflagging effort. You
may ask what kind of convictions? Convictions about what?

I would reply, convictions as to the proper function of the college
of liberal arts and the proper function of each of the professional
schools; convictions regarding the best methods of teaching and the
best approach to knowledge. For example, a university might put its
greatest effort upon the unity or interrelatedness of knowledge and
break down interdepartmental barriers and build up every influence
that broadens the student's contacts and horizons. Or some university
might be built around research work as nearly as possible to the
exclusion of introductory or merely expository instruction.  Or an-
other university might be built around the conviction that intimate
tutorial relationships are more significant than any other form of
teaching. Or another might incarnate the conviction that service to
the community tops every other consideration in university admin-
istration, or that developing citizenship and responsible characters
is the only thing that matters. Such possible courses should not be
regarded as irresponsible experimentation : without the least doubt
each of these special emphases would be peculiarly suited to a con-

11

siderable number of students in these United States.  Eliot's elective
system at Harvard was perfectly adapted to some students and
equally unsuited to others. But any alert student could know in
advance just what to expect at Harvard. Each university should care
and dare to have its own particular convictions: and students should
do some thinking and choosing where they'll go.

The State universities, being geographical, have, as it would seem,
the obligation to compromise and be attentive to local needs of many
kinds. From the State universities I expect, therefore, less venture-
some freedom to follow a clearly defined conviction to its logical
and happy conclusion.  This does not mean that State universities
should not take advantage of regional agreements in point of the
adequate development of different areas of knowledge. But it does
mean that private universities are foolish to compete with State
universities in size and coverage and a polyvalent attitude toward
education. The private universities should realize that they must
have a special function, determine what it is and then declare their
convictions and rely on the self-challenge that accompanies such a
ddaration. I realize that this is somewhat a counsel of perfection.
At present most private universities present a confusing accumula-
tion, a sort of palimpsest of successive policies and conflicting views.
And most of them are flirting with the idea of accepting federal aid
to help maintain a wide variety of policies and usages. There is a
Brazilian proverb which runs, "Quem quer tudo perde tudo"-who
wants everything loses everything. But what are the private univer-
sities to do? Try to do a little to please every variety of interest and
conviction only to find that what is everybody's business is nobody's
business? Do private citizens prefer to be taxed and so provide
funds through the Federal treasury for the support of private univer-
sities? Or will they give to such institutions directly to enable them
to steer clear of government subsidies? Cannot "rugged individual-
ism" be applied to giving money as well as making it?

IN the oncoming crisis of financing our universities the old Amer-
ican tradition that the students have the right of way will be invoked,
I think, to justify taking government aid. The argument that the
private medical schools should accept federal subsidies runs in this
wise. Forty-one of our seventy-eight medical schools are privately
endowed. The quality and number of their students provide an

12

important part of current medical care. The costs of medical educa-
tion are a part of the costs of medical care. The people want medical
care and will now pay taxes to provide it rather than go without.
Private funds are not forthcoming to keep our medical schools
solvent and producing enough doctors for the public's needs. There-
fore Congress will vote a subsidy to medical schools, making no
effort to control the educational policies of such schools as are
above a reasonable minimum of performance. The arguments against
Federal subsidies are these: acceptance of Federal aid will progres-
sively diminish the gifts from private sources. Private schools may
lose their independence to experiment and explore new ways of
teaching. Local pride will wither and die. Control from Washington
will then grow despite the fact that it may not have been intended
at the outset. Politics will creep in and power will gravitate into
fewer hands and the equivalent of absentee ownership will prevail.
Some way must be found to preserve the liberty of our hitherto inde-
pendent schools. Would group practice organization of our medical
schools not be the lesser of two evils?

Well-do you wonder that I have spoken of shared conviction as
the ultimate strength of the university?

T HE year 1890 witnessed the end of the American frontier, for
in that year a narrow aisle of population of at least two persons to
the square mile stretched across the plains and the mountain states
to the Pacific slope. Until then a common solution of social tensions
was merely to move West, to unoccupied land where we would not
be bothered by neighbors, because there would be no neighbors.
1890 is a convenient date to mark the beginning of a growing need
in this country-the need for political maturity. Our past has been
characterized by an almost neurotic distrust of government.  I re-
member a young Hungarian whom I met in Paris in 1925 who had
spent a year in the United States. With great earnestness he posed
this question: "I was told in America that your best men do not go
into government service. How can the United States survive without
using them?" An interesting question and one to which student life
in our colleges and universities supplies more of an answer than
I think most of us realize. Let me expIain.

Man, as the Greeks observed, is a political animal. His education
should therefore include preparation for dealing with his fellows.

13

In our colleges and universities the methods of instruction so con-
stantly cheat (though with the best of intensions) our young people
of the responsibility of planning, ordering and controlling their
intellectual growth that in the colleges at least they have both time
and inclination to organize and maintain activities of their own.
College papers, dramatics, bands, debating clubs, dances and some-
times athletics are examples of these extra-curricular activities.  In
them - responsibility is assumed by the students,--responsibility for
planning and cooperation in executing their plans. No grades are
given. You either make the editorial board or you don't.  Failure
is evident and painful. The more ability a young man has, the more
is expected of him. In college he is young enough to be able to
discover what to the rest of us later becomes commonplace; namely,
that you get out of anything about as much as you put into it.
He is young enough to be able to learn much of what various
kinds of social behavior lead to. He is getting at least some experi-
ence in choosing when arid on what he will engage his strength, the
strategy of life. And he is hammering all this out with his contem-
poraries and his equals. That is the important aspect of extra-
curricular activities : that student activities give our young people a
splendid start in learning to deal with each other.

I NEVER realized how valuable are the extra-curricular activities of
our colleges until I visited the universities in the western zone of
Germany last September and October. More than ever the German
university student lives a life in which isolation, competition and
anxiety over his marks control his waking hours.  Indeed so intense
is this competitive existence that I wouldn't be surprised if it colored
his dreams with nightmares of failure. His purpose is to get high
marks in the examinations and if possible to attract the favorable
attention of his teachers. In the pursuit of such objectives he has
no time to spend in extra-curricular activities. So, he thinks, why
waste time with mere contemporaries and equals when by subordinat-
ing myself to my elders and betters I can get ahead of my fellow
students and secure a livelihood and a superior status?  As a result
of this attitude the German student is more than ever immature in
his social relationships. In the hands of such frightened adolescents,
the famous Lernfreiheit is sadly abused. Talking with four of these
students one evening I happened to use the phrase "agree to dis-

14

agree." It was apparently a totally new idea to all of them.  One
of them, uncertain of whether he heard aright, asked, "Does this
mean that you can get along with people you do not like?" "Yes,"
1 replied, "And it is sometimes useful even with people you do
like." The only comment of the others was "Fibelhaft!" On another
occasion I asked some students whether they cfid not resent the type
of student who was forever currying favor with teacher. This, too,
seemed a new point of view, for they asked if American students
resented such behavior. "Yes," I said, "We even have a name for
il-apple polishing," and I explained the term. Later in the discus-
sion I was diverted to hear frequent reference to die Apfelpolitik.
I had known of Weltpolitik und Kriegspolitik. . . . I submit to you
the simple reflection that the forerunner of Kriegspolitik and Welt-
politik may be an educational system and experience that encourages
A p f elpolitik.

In any case I believe that what our students learn through extra-
curricular activities of the art of working together and getting along
with contemporaries and equals is one of our greatest political assets.
If twenty per cent of Americans from 18 to 22 are now going to
college, and if extra-curricular activities show them how to live and
work together in effective and harmonious relationship, then that
aspect of higher education calls for preservation in any changes that
may be contemplated.

* ++ <- 9

N 0 anniversary can claim its appropriate significance that omits

all reference to those who began and have maintained the institution
through all the years. No list, however, could be complete, for
many a wise and generous action that has nourished this medical
school has been done quietly and in deliberate anonymity by your
predecessors. I speak not only of benefactors but of the trustees,
of the officers, of the teachers, of the employees and of the students-
of everyone whose work for and in the university has been signed
with the indelible signature of him who does just a bit more than
was expected. For like all things in nature, a university lives from
the life abounding round about it. One might safely surmise that
we would not be here tonight nor at our tasks tomorrow were it not
for the unrequested and unrecorded generosity of those who are no
longer here. Every seat in this room could be occupied by the spirits
of persons who have in a sense provided your places for you, for

15

the present is their creation just as the future will be yours. In the
symphony of the school's history one chord gives place to another
:itself incomplete yet part of a long sequence yet to be played.
``Let us not be misled by words: a university does not have an
existence apart from those who participate in it. The word univer-
sity conveniently comprises the voluntary relationships of large
numbers of human beings. The Brazilians have a refreshing way
of saying "I get along well with someone." They say, "I give myself
well with him." The task must be to make this university a center
of relationships so firm and yet so sensitive, so critical and yet so
grateful, so earnest and yet so light, so devoted and yet so generous
that no one can pass as much as a year in Washington University
without being able to say, "That was the year I first found the best
there was in me and in those about me-I gave myself well in that
University."

({I have spoken much of conviction but little of its counterfeits,
vanity, impatience and intolerance, or its devouring canker, self -
pitying indignation. To those in this school who may care to create
productive and satisfactory human relationships, Shakespeare's lines
offer the best advice,me'er prefer your injury to your heart lest
you bring it into danger.$ ' )'

I

16