Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America

In 1918 Thorsten Veblen was serving as a statistical expert for the Food Administration. In this capacity he prepared a report demonstrating that the shortage of farm labor in the Midwest could be met by ending the harassment and persecution of the members of the IWW's agricultural division. Veblen felt he was doing the best that could be expected of him as an intellectual expert in devoting his scholarly talents to the reaching of a workable solution to a social problem. The result of this particular application of expertise led to his being fired for his efforts. On the other hand, a large number of "loyal" academics, drawn from the faculties of the nation's leading universities, were so busy converting their expertise into uncritical support of the Great Crusade that it was difficult to place restraint on their service. As Carol S. Gruber, author of this revealing study of the uses of American higher learning in World War I points out, this development, which tied strongly into an American tradition of public education's duty to provide service to the state, was seized upon as a useful and exciting opportunity by many academics to play a role they had long coveted. As one of them, Ralph Barton Perry, was to write after the war, there was a certain euphoria "in expending one's energy with undivided conscience and with the approval of one's fellows" (p. 115). It afforded a new sense of scope and power, and was a form of war service "almost as good as being at the front itself." On the other hand, this quest for purpose and "reality" outside campus walls suggests a view of the early-twentieth-century American university itself and the academic profession as lacking in purpose and being societally peripheral. In this respect the professors' response to the war may well have been an attempted escape from alienation and role frustration in an academic world suffering at that time from a disturbing plethora of both insecurity and anomie.