Alexander Meiklejohn (1872–1964)

The author, as president of Amherst College, famously hired Robert Frost, the first poet college professor, thereby beginning a century of practice where thousands of poets now depend on universities for income. Amherst College is rich in histories, this the second, from 1920 on my shelf of seven (for others, see my review of Pritchard’s English Papers).
As a community college teacher for four decades, re-reading Meiklejohn surprised me. He covers very well the issue of practical education show more (or professional training) versus liberal education—the education of a Roman citizen, liberus, a free man But our author was also liberal in our usual political sense, which Frost the Yankee called “Meiklejaundice,” though later in his life he said “Meiklejohn was right.” And of course, Frost, as some form of Republican, was featured by the most famous of liberal presidents, JFK.
Meiklejohn gives his name to two parts of his alma mater, Brown University: a counseling program, and a building housing Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. But our author warns about the current displacement of learned men from college administration. After his chapter on “What the College is Not,” he takes up “What the Liberal College Is”: the teacher must stand before the community as the intellectual leader of his time. “If the leadership is taken from him and given to other, then the very foundations of the scheme of instruction are shaken”(29). At most public institutions I know, and even most private, professional administrators have displaced learned leaders, with the colleges run mostly with an eye to budget and sales.
On the other hand, Meiklejohn does note that specialized intellectuals may say all subjects are of equal value in a student’s education, “[which] seems to me hopelessly at variance with any sound educational doctrine”(41). He adds that this “fallacy of the scholar” runs through “all the varieties of the elective system” as now electives dominate college curricula. A famous professor of mine, from England, taught at Johns Hopkins in the 70s; she thought the Hopkins curriculum fostered such scholarly specialization without the “organic relationships between them nor the common task which should bind them together”(41).
Many times our author comments on political problems a century later; today (Feb 2019) the Republicans have grown alarmed at public schools teaching Fairness, and Meiklejohn suggests why, “Men can be stirred to eager and desperate activity by the perception that other men are not being treated fairly”(54). And percipiently, he warns that bourgeois success alone may not lead to the best human life: “Wealth has not very generally brought to those who have it the fineness of taste and the niceness of discrimination which the use of it demands. Quite as often it has brought coarseness of feeling and dullness of appreciation”(55). We have a presidential example of coarseness in a gold-plated crapper.
The mind of a nation, who builds it? Our author doubts we trust journalists, “editor and news collector,” to do it—though he writes a century ago, and the place of journalism or media has risen from his time, though his politicians are ours: “Even less are our public men equipped for bringing our thinking under control [away from mere emotions and mob action]. More even than the newspaper, they…are talked about as advocates of parties, interests, sections, creeds…And when they …discuss public policy, we are often as busy in peddling gossip behind their backs, in talking scandal and petty spite, as in listening to their words”(63).
Meiklejohn suggests our American priorities may undermine the growth of our national mind: “For many reasons we as a people are now failing to achieve intellectual unity. [many different streams of impulse, opinion and prejudice] People from many separate races have poured into our ranks. Our own national tradition of individualism has unfitted us for the breaking down of barriers”(61). show less