Stephen Leacock’s ideal college

 Stephen Leacock, the essayist, said that if someone gave him two dozen old elm trees and 50 acres he could set up a college that would put the big universities of his day in the shade.

Leacock was writing in the 1930s, and parts of his vision about what makes a good college are painfully wrong. He thought colleges were wonderful institutions for men and women — but not together. The kind of study that goes on at the best colleges has a single-minded quality that tends to be less single-minded when genders mingle, Leacock said.

That thought made me wince 50 years ago. But parts of his essay on the ideal college still make me wish such a place existed.

Leacock’s college would offer no business courses. He also thought medicine and engineering should be taught in schools, not colleges. College is for something else.

Leacock’s college would have no newspaper, no student government, no sports teams. Students could play games whenever they wanted. But the teams wouldn’t be advertising vehicles and revenue generators for the college.

Money wouldn’t be a consideration in anything the college did.

 

Money ruins life: I mean, to have to think of it, to take account of it, to know that it is there.

 

People involved in exploration don’t think of money while they’re on expeditions, Leacock said. College should such an expedition — an opportunity for a student to get absorbed in exploration.

Leacock’s college is a place where professors don’t keep office hours and don’t attend committee meetings. (Committees are banned at Leacock’s college.)

 

Men of thought have no business in an office.

 

The professors’ job would be to study and learn about a subject and communicate what it’s like to be interested in something — or better, to be beyond interested, absorbed, almost consumed. Professor should be so absorbed they’re contagious.

That’s what the college would be about: to give students a sense of what that kind of fascination with a subject is like. After college, a student could pursue her own interests on her own.

That’s the gist of Leacock’s college. I never attended such a place. The only university that would give me a degree was an enormous state institution with a famous football team — the very kind of place Leacock was writing against.

But decades later, I’m still thinking about his ideal.

• Stephen Leacock’s “On the Need for a Quiet College” is in Moral Memoirs; New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1938, pp. 169-177. The quotations are on pp. 172 and 170.