Note 725 — Chapter XIV · Scholarship and Teaching.

On p. 409 it is said that a sort of “pseudo-productivity” is likely to attend the excessive emphasis laid on scholarship. This statement finds a striking confirmation in the latest Report of the Com. of Ed. (1901, vol. I, pp. 127–128). In a brief article “Higher Education made in Germany,” we read among other things: “To deplore the fact that our scholarship has a strong German tinge would be like apologizing for the loins from which we sprang. And yet it is a question if of recent years we have not followed German methods too exclusively and too unintelligently.” The Germans themselves often misuse the scientific method on trivial subjects. “Scholarship suffers from an enormous over-production of monographs in which an ambitious method stretches a thin substance to the cracking point. There is a craze not to prove something valuable, but to prove something.” A few remarkable instances of such “scholarly” productions of American graduate students are given in the same article.