Universities and the Making of Businessmen

Universities and the Making of Businessmen ISir Arnold Plant Universities are the home of vocational education. Throughout the greater part of their history, the task of the most ancient of them was to educate men for the ecclesiastical profession, including the public and civil offices to which clerics then expected as of right to be nominated. I recall the impression made upon me by a passage in a paper delivered in 1921 by the late Sir William Asbley, then Professor of Commerce and Vice-Principal of the University of Birmingham, to the Second Conference of Universities of the Empire assembled at Oxford. "It may be doubted," he said, "whether general mental culture was ever maintained to be the prime raison d'eIre of a university until Oxford and Cambridge, some sixty or seventy years ago, began to acquire a body of resident lay tutors. In encouraging what we may even call 'vocational' studies, the modern university is but reverting to its age-long traditions." As I had myself a year earlier interrupted (as I then imagined) my career as a business manager to study at a university in preparation for more responsible administrative work, it was reassuring to learn that in preferring the economics and commerce degree curricula at London to the best alternatives which, as it seemed to my untutored mind, the older universities then had to offer, I had probably chosen even better than I knew. I was already finding my capacities more than sufficiently extended by my studies and the calls of student life in London. Vocational subjects directly and obviously appropriate to a business career were handled in a way which developed and exercised the reasoning faculty, providing the mental discipline and mental enlargement which merits the name of a university education. So at any rate it has seemed to me. I cannot of course know whether the path I chose was in fact the best then open to me. I know only that UNIVERSITmS AND THB MAKING OF BUSINBSSMBN 521 I went through the anxieties of mental torment. The process is familiar enough to those who have been privileged to pursue any well-organized course of study in one of the real universities of the world. I remember first one's consternation at being unable to see that intellectual problems and difficulties existed which clearly worried fellow students and teachers whom one had already learned to respect. Then came the flash of realization, the effort to define a problem, once perceived, in terms which pinned it down, and the baflling failure to find a satisfying path towards its solution. Occasionally there followed the infuriating assistance from a book or a teacher which revealed one's stupidity. More often than not the chase had to be adjourned at the stage when one knew little more than what were the fallacious or sterile approaches to the solution, and realized that a great deal more reading, research, and reflection had to be undertaken before one could hope to make a confident step forward. My vocational course of study was exquisite torture, culminating in a self-imposed life sentence of hard intellectual labour. The fact that the development of new specialist schools of learning in response to changing social and industrial needs came more quickly in England in the universities of the metropolis and the growing provincial centres than in the older universities was due at least as much to their special interest in opportunist experimentation as to any sure conviction that what they proposed to offer was intellectually more suitable for the more able students or more satisfying to every teacher. After all, the newer uuiversities had of necessity in the early stages of their development to attract their own teachers from the ancient centres, and these men knew that a curriculum which failed to impart a general mental culture had no place in a university. The older universities continued to develop their schools and triposes along the old and well-tested lines which most surely achieved that main purpose. The college fellows concentrated on teaching what they understood, building on the subjects traditionally taught in the famous schools from which they themselves were largely drawn and to...