There is at Harvard one of the greatest of living philosophers, Professor Whitehead. It is with infinite regret that one is obliged to utter a word in criticism of him; but in what, I suspect, was an amiable moment, Professor Whiteland made an address which has been incorporated in a volume published by the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. There are not lacking in this address indications that Professor Whitehead perceives the importance of a broad and disinterested study of business phenomena; but this broad and disinterested study will not lead to the immediate result in which business technicians are interested, and somehow Professor Whitehead could not lose sight of the technicians. We come, therefore, upon this startling sentence in which he differentiates between understanding, which I take to be the university's concern, and routine, which as such is no concern of the university at all except as a subject of investigation and criticism. Professor Whitehead says: 'Routine is more fundamental than understanding, that is, routine modified by minor flashes of short-range intelligence.' I call that a startling and significant sentence. The business mind is thus essentially the mind of the routineer, the darkness of which is from time to time illumined by striking a match, and Harvard University is obligated to such training. I should like to contrast Whitehead's deadly sentence with a sentence spoken by Wilhelm von Humboldt: 'The thing is not to let the scholars and universities go on in a drowsy and impotent routine. The thing is to raise the culture of the nation ever higher and higher by their means.'

Correct Attitude

Now it is not Professor Whitehead, apologizing for the teaching of routine, but it is Von Hunboldt who gives us the cue to the correct attitude of the university toward the engulfing activities called business; and yet that Professor Whitehead rather than Von Humboldt describes the current trend of university business schools is abundantly illustrated not only by the catalogues in which the schools of business set forth their aims and their offerings, but by the specific tasks which they undertake while employing a university jargon. One wonders, for example, what the real scholars and scientists at Harvard think of 'scientific research in advertising and cooperative analysis of broadcasting'. Let me quote some of the questions employed in the 'research' for which Harvard has given a prize to the Association of National Advertisers.

What effect does the summer time have on listening habits?

How do the sexes vary in their preference?

How long can a campaign be run before it begins to wear out?

To such a pass has the Harvard of Agassiz, Child, Pierce, Eliot, Haskins, Turner, and Richards come