Professors at Work

War has violently discomboobulated the teaching of the liberal arts--as well as the professorial leisure that supposedly went with it. Highlighting the disturbance was a survey recently completed at Colgate University, whose faculty is now teaching both Naval and civilian students.

Colgate's big job now is giving Navy preflight and other training to 650 cadets. (By July 1 there will be 1,083.) When the Navy chose Colgate as a preflight school, a dozen facultymen spent their Christmas holidays studying navigation. Others crammed mathematics, aerology, aircraft engines, flight principles, communications. Today many are teaching cadets what they themselves learned only a few weeks ago. Many still give peacetime courses too.

Prewar Colgate teachers averaged 28 hours of work a week (preparing, teaching, administering), were otherwise free to research, write, loaf. Today teaching takes up 18.8 hours, preparation (often of unfamiliar wartime specialties) 21.7 hours, other duties more than nine hours.

For their extra effort, the professors get the Navy's praise, no extra pay. Their reactions have the variety to be expected in a democratic faculty.* Samples:

P:Chemist Sidney James French, coordinator of the Naval Flight Preparatory School: "The extra work has shown me that prewar liberal-arts college education was a leisurely way of killing four good years in a young man's life."

P: A philosopher, teaching navigation: "I doubt that my postwar teaching will be improved. [Flight teaching] is drill, not education."

P:A linguist, teaching aerology: "The performance of unfamiliar tasks seems to me to reveal the adaptability which liberal education is supposed to promote."

P:A linguist, teaching navigation: "Those involved in Navy teaching will be so far behind their colleagues that they will suffer in scholarship, rank and salary."

P:A gym teacher, teaching gym: "If getting on deck at 5 a.m. is a sacrifice (which I doubt), I'm making one."

P: A litterateur, teaching aerology: "I find myself reading the word 'humility' as 'humidity,' and when a novelist writes, 'She burst into tears,' I mentally comment, why doesn't he say 'She reached her dew point?' "

*Writes New York University's Adolph Erich Meyer, associate professor of education, in the June American Mercury: "Everywhere, like the hard-pressed butchers and gas dealers, the men of learning are beating their breasts and saying their prayers. . . .[The war] has finally stopped the limitless expansion which created such chain stores of the intellect as California, Northwestern, Boston, Columbia and New York. . . . This blow should be considerably softened by the large exodus of vocational guides, scientific sociologists, and the professors of business administration . . . handshakers and promoters. . . ."

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