The following is an essay entitled, “Ph.D. — Director of Philanthropy,” which Lloyd Douglas published in the February 1919 issue of The Intercollegian, the monthly magazine of the YMCA. At the beginning of this essay, Douglas talks about two black men on a ship, one of which is seasick. His bunkmate tells him “we’s a passin’ a ship!” According to Douglas, the seasick man says, “Ah doan want tuh see no ship…. Call me when we’s a passin’ a tree!”
The Great War (which we now call WWI) had just concluded two months earlier, and Douglas draws the lesson:
“This yarn fits our mood. Certain sights, sounds, and demands have palled on us. Only a change of scenery will beguile our interest. The lore of bayonets, red and sticky, and of dead men’s legs sticking up out of the mud of the trenches — it is enough! Lead us away.
“It happens, now, that ‘we’s a passin’ a tree.’ Tourists will kindly hunt a porthole and look out.
“I’m both sorry and glad that I am not a faculty man, these days — sorry because I should like to have his chance to become immortal in the lives of the young fellows who are so eager to be led into a larger life; glad because I shouldn’t want to risk foozling such an opportunity.
“College students are facing their tasks just now with deep seriousness. The old selfishness has become unpopular. They used to say, ‘I should worry!’ Now they are saying, ‘I should worry!’ They are anxious to be challenged to do something to prove their right to live in these high days.
“A tremendous amount of spiritual energy, no longer static but kinetic, has been and is being generated in the heart of the young collegian. All persons who have to do with him will be held accountable by human society for the manner in which they help to recharge the batteries of life with this new dynamic, to carry the race over the long, lean years of such material prosperity as invariably follows great crises.
“The faculty man who believes in Christianity as ‘the theory of applied altruism’ and dares to say that he believes it in his classroom; challenging men to operate their lives centifugally; calling recent events to witness the folly of attempting to live centripetally; may justly feel that the five minutes he spends in making that speech are worth a whole semester’s lectures on his particular subject.
“Inversely, the member of the college teaching force who pooh-poohs the zealous aspirations of young men and women to invest themselves in some heroic philanthropic service is useful only as a brilliant and theatrical example of an ‘undesirable citizen.’
“Every thoughtful man is now called upon to acknowledge the value of ‘the imponderables’ — the facts of life which cannot be assayed by the ton or estimated with a slide rule.
“A certain type of academic, accustomed to doing his thinking only in the pluperfect [well in the past, in other words], will still pursue the ‘laboratory method’ of dealing with everything — regardless. Whether he makes research of a poem, an acid, a dogma, or an oratorio, he straps on his rubber apron, adjusts his green eye shade, lights the gas burner under the little copper pot, and pours whatever-it-is into a test tube.
“There is developing a new type of college instructor, however, whose imagination and faith are going to work wonders in helping the present crop of serious-minded students to deepen their own convictions that the greatest energies of this age are not to be spoken of in terms of KWs or BTUs [kilowatts or British Thermal Units].
“To my mind, there is no prophetic office more potential, in our day, than that occupied by the conscientious and fearless faculty man.
“His mere aside, tossed into a lecture, touching upon the importance of conserving the spiritual energies generated by this age of heroism and sacrifice, is worth more than all the sermons of the college preachers.
“One needs hardly add that his sneer at ‘the present wave of sentimentality’ can easily chill the ardor of many a student whose interest had been turned toward the things of life that really count.
“He shall be long remembered as a loyal friend of humanity, whose Ph.D. in these days means, ‘Director of Philanthropists’ — the potential philanthropists now in training in our colleges.”
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