Page:Higher Learning In America, The (Veblen).djvu/64

48 and the political. But in the long run these various interests and ideals of expediency have, all and several, shown themselves to be only factional elements in the scheme of culture, and have lost their preferential voice in the shaping of academic life. The place in men's esteem once filled by church and state is now held by pecuniary traffic, business enterprise. So that the graver issues of academic policy which now tax the discretion of the directive powers, reduce themselves in the main to a question between the claims of science and scholarship on the one hand and those of business principles and pecuniary gain on the other hand. In one shape or another this problem of adjustment, reconciliation or compromise between the needs of the higher learning and the demands of business enterprise is for ever present in the deliberations of the university directorate. This question gathers in its net all those perplexing details of expediency that now claim the attention of the ruling bodies.

VI

Since the paragraphs that make up the foregoing chapter were written the American academic community has been thrown into a new and peculiar position by the fortunes of war. The progress and the further promise of the war hold in prospect new and untried responsibilities, as well as an unexampled opportunity. So that the outlook now (June 1918) would seem to be that the Americans are to be brought into a central place in the republic of learning; to take a position, not so much of dominance as of trust and guardianship; not so much by virtue of their own superior merit as by force of the insolvency of the European academic community.