ARE FELLOWSHIPS ALMSGIVING OR INVESTMENTS?
To the Editor: In the Popular Science Monthly for September, page 472, Mrs. W. A. Kellerman asks, 'Are Fellowships Almsgiving or Investments?'
As ordinarily granted in American universities, they may be either. Still more often they are rather advertisements, and they may in any case partake of the nature of all three of these. The great gifts to education have been for the purpose not of feeding men but of furnishing means of study and investigation beyond the reach of individual effort. This is 'investment put to the credit of the country's future.' The ordinary fellowship furnishes not special facilities, but board and lodging for individuals, matters quite within the range of individual effort on the part of almost any student worth educating. It does not increase scholarship but multiplies the number of those who scramble for its rewards. The same amounts expended in better teachers and in better facilities for work would do more for American scholarship than the fellowships now accomplish.
It is understood that the Carnegie gift is to be devoted solely to the promotion of research, not to the encouragement of men who show mere promise of ability. It is to be used to complete the equipment of investigators who have already done all within their power as individuals, and whose lives will be devoted to research whether helped or not. To aid in making their work effective is not almsgiving. If any part of the fund is used to hire men to undertake research, it will be wasted, and the trustees of the fund will have to resist many temptations to do this.
The fellowship is now largely used as a means of university advertisement, to the real injury of higher education. To induce any man to go where he does not wish to go or to study what he would not otherwise have cared for is to cheapen higher education.
Real scholars will work out their own salvation, so far as the cost of education is concerned. Real universities are built up by real investigators. To furnish these and their students with books, implements and materials 'will bring students worthy of the opportunity. To give students that which they need in their work and can not buy for themselves is to draw the line between 'investment' and 'almsgiving.'
Certainly the whole American 'system of fellowships for advanced students is now on trial with most of the evidence against it.'
COLLEGE PROFESSORS.
To the Editor: I have read with interest Professor Stevenson's article in the September number of the Monthly. It is sane and well considered. Two of his generalizations are however not based on a sufficient number of data. In speaking of the college professors of a generation ago he says, 'The hours of teaching were short.' In so far as this was the case I believe it was the exception rather than the rule. Not long ago a professor who began to teach in the fifties remarked to me incidentally in a conversation,' For many years I taught all the time and so did my colleagues.'
