REGENTS MERGE TWO DEPARTMENTS
By Louis A. Strauss, ’93, Ph.M. ’94, Ph.D. ’00, Professor of English
The recent action of the Board of Regents in combining the departments of English and Rhetoric is in line with its general policy of creating larger instructional units within the college.
About two years ago the Board established what is known as the "Division of English." including the departments of English, Rhetoric and Speech. The purpose of this association was to effect a closer cooperation between the several departments, each of which was to preserve its identity and autonomy. Even this loosely knit organization has been able to realize in part the desired cooperation in a variety of ways; most important of these are, first, the revision and standardization of the requirements for the doctorate in the three subjects; secondly, the establishment of a program of studies leading to the bestowal of the teacher's certificate in English and Rhetoric. Previously each department had conferred its certificate independently with widely different requirements; an anomalous proceeding, since the two subjects are regarded as one in practically all of the universities, colleges, normal schools and secondary schools of the country.
What was gained through the establishment of the Division of English has pointed clearly to the need of a still closer organization. The Division could legislate, but it had no power to carry out its policies except by the whole-hearted concurrence of its discrete elements. There has long existed on the campus a conviction that the number of specialized courses in composition has been allowed to grow beyond reason: also that duplication of courses as between the subjects of literature and rhetoric had become wasteful and ill-advised. Doubtless the Board of Regents had these things in mind in ordering the new amalgamation. For the Division of English to suggest retrenchment to one or another department would have been resented as an unwarranted intrusion by the department concerned and would have speedily nullified the further efforts of the Division for good. The Division still has, and perhaps always will have, work to do for the newly created Department of English Language and Literature and the Department of Speech. For reasons we shall not enter into, there is no need of a closer alliance between these departments.
For the benefit of the older alumni who have long accepted the division of the departments as normal and desirable, it may be well briefly to consider the conditions obtaining when they were separated. I happen to be the only member of either department who was a member of the faculty at that time, I was an instructor in English, but my work was largely in composition. When the division was effected I and the next oldest instructor were offered our choice of a place in either department. Both elected to teach English literature. In the light of what follows this may be significant.
The separation was consummated with the best feeling on both sides. Professor I. N. Demmon, though regarded as a conservative, was a broad-gauged man. Whatever his views may have been as to the general wisdom of the proposed change, he recognized certain unique features of the situation at Michigan that seemed to warrant the experiment. Chief of these was the fact that in Professor F. N. Scott the University possessed an educational leader of national, indeed of world reputation. The two men were loyal, devoted friends, but aside from this, Mr. Demmon was not the man to oppose obstacles to the progress of a colleague whom he admired and respected, in whose authentic soundness he had faith, and in whom he perceived qualities nearly allied to genius. He gave ungrudging consent to the change.
This was in 1903. Professor Scott, on his side, believed sincerely—and correctly—that with the prestige of a department head he could more readily and adequately secure the support necessary for the advancement of the subject he loved. Ten years earlier he had burned his boats and declared himself wholly and exclusively committed to rhetoric as his field of investigation and instruction—a daring venture at that time, when it was anything but a popular subject, and utterly without standing as a field of graduate study and research. Professor Scott speedily gave it such standing.
The new department flourished and grew. Amazingly graduate students flocked from far and wide to work with this brilliant scholar; the women's colleges in the East, in particular, sent their most promising aspirants to academic careers for practical and scientific training under his guidance. At that time these colleges offered little graduate work, and the great graduate schools of the East were not hospitable to women. They came with high expectations of fruitful contact with a teacher known to the English-speaking peoples as the leading exponent of his subject.
They were not disappointed. Professor Scott was the ideal teacher of the science and art of literary expression. His range of interests was well-nigh universal. An acute critic, an accomplished linguist, a skillful bibliographer, he had at command, beside his splendid background in English literature and his thorough mastery of the history of rhetoric, a wide knowledge of the arts of painting and music and of many literatures, ancient and modern, a profound grasp of philosophy in general and aesthetics in particular, and such an appreciation of many sciences as few teachers of the humanities possess. His seminar in the History of Rhetoric was as fundamental and vital in the equipment of a teacher of English as any graduate course I have ever known. His course in Interpretations of Literature and Art constituted the greatest intellectual experience of many generations of students. Dr. Scott's conception of rhetoric was catholic in the extreme; it was limited only by the range of his own personal interests, which really means that it was not limited at all. Under the spell of his magnetic and stimulating personality his students developed to their utmost capacity. They are to be found everywhere—brilliant teachers, successful writers, and men in every walk of life upon whose tastes and characters his influence is indelibly stamped; and they are not backward in saying so.
There is a well-known biological principle observable in university life that all teachers of long experience have seen exemplified again and again. When a department is more than moderately successful, its growth tends toward academic elephantiasis. More students mean more instructors; more instructors, more courses; more courses, more students—a vicious circle. Unless this tendency is closely watched and sternly checked, the saturation point is reached and passed—then dregs. This is the chief cause of financial waste and educational ineffectiveness in American universities today. This is the reason why many a department head who was eager to assume the responsibility and authority of headship soon wearies of administrative work and wishes himself well out of it. Professor Scott was not a born executive. He disliked the push and haul of conflicting interests and ambitions. As the department grew, he naturally fell into a laissez aller attitude and became ever more deeply engrossed in the more alluring tasks of his teaching and research. Who can blame him
There are two aspects of this situation which impress me as especially important; they are concerned respectively, first, with the injustice done to the instructor, and secondly, to the misleading of the student.
The preparation for his profession received by a teacher of rhetoric is in general precisely the same as that of the teacher of English literature or language. The major part of it is in English language and literature—the minor part in rhetoric and composition. (I have in mind the universities of the country, not just Michigan.) When a young man begins his college teaching, he is usually given work exclusively in composition. This he regards as his apprenticeship. If he "makes good," he expects to be tried in literature, and in most cases he hopes to work into that part of the field. I have heard many a young man say that if he thought he was to be kept at teaching composition all his life, he would certainly not choose teaching as a profession. It is not merely the burden of theme correction that he resents, though this is not unimportant. He chiefly feels that rhetoric as a practical subject has no content of its own, and he fears the danger of slipping into a rut and stagnating intellectually for want of a definite subject matter to keep him interested and ambitiously active. It is true that a few members of any English staff prefer and love to teach composition because of the intimate knowledge it brings to them of the student's inner life and the opportunity it affords them to influence his growth of mind, taste, and character. Such teachers are as valuable as they are rare, and their preference in the matter should be respected. This is possible as readily in a single department as in an organization that erects a Chinese Wall between one half of members and the subject of their preference. It will surely be respected in the newly created department.
As regards the student body, the matter is some what less obvious. It is impossible to generalize as to the right amount of composition work, because of the great diversities in ability, school preparation, home influences and what not. Of course the student who is wretchedly weak in composition, if he is allowed to remain in college, needs enough work of this kind to lift him from illiteracy to educational respectability. At the other extreme, the gifted or brilliant young writer should not be debarred the benefit of criticism in higher courses, though there is danger of his following the line of least resistance and selling his academic birthright for a mess of pottage. But we are mainly concerned with the mass of students who write neither too badly nor too well. A good substantial course in composition and literature, and the opportunity for an advanced course or two after he has learned enough to have something worth writing about—this should suffice. We have been tempting him with an array of courses that has lured him into doing the same thing over and over again. Not that this is in itself bad—but when it amounts to truncating by a year or so his work in history, philosophy, the foreign languages, the sciences (physical, biological, social, and mathematical) not to mention many other subjects that are essential to scholarly discipline or cultural background, it surely is a pity. One of the most constant remarks of the better students is that the tragedy of a college education lies in the great number of courses of all kinds that they ought to take and the utter impossibility of taking even a fair proportion of them in four years. Why say more
I should like to close this already-too-long statement by expressing my admiration and esteem for the members of the Rhetoric staff who have long and devotedly served the University in an order not of their making. I hope and believe that they will be happy in their new situation and that their work will gain in effectiveness and attractiveness by the removal of the trammels that hemmed it in. That the two elements in the new department will fraternize and be mutually stimulating and helpful, and that they will quickly fuse into a unit, I am certain. Accordingly, I rejoice in the action of the Regents as a step for the betterment of the University and the subjects involved.
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new.
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
The Michigan Alumnus
February 8, 1930, Page 331
