Abstract
UNDER the title “The Dry-rot of our Academic Biology,” Prof. W. M. Wheeler delivered a most provocative address to the American Society of Naturalists, which is printed in Science (vol. 57, pp. 61–70). The address may have been written under the reaction from the author's labours upon a volume of noo pages upon ants, but it provides food for thought for the teacher of biology. The title seems to have been chosen in part with an impish desire to lead the librarian astray, so that future students of the fungi may find it “reposing unashamed between such monuments of cryptogamic erudition as the 74 folio volumes of Professor Farlow's Toadstools of God's Footstool' and the 27 quarto volumes of Professor Thaxter's Laboulbeniales of the Universe”; in part to indicate Prof. Wheeler's foreboding as to the devastating effect of academic biology upon the young minds exposed to the danger. Apparently 25 per cent. of the young men and women graduating in the United States have had at least the equivalent of an elementary course in botany or zoology, but of these very few exhibit a vital and abiding interest in biological inquiry. This seems to have led to this interesting analysis of the relative ineffectiveness of biological teaching (tinged, perhaps, with the after effects of eleven hundred pages upon ants !). Some of the suggested defects will certainly provoke sympathetic response in Great Britain, for instance the complaint that biologists are compelled to be most active pedagogically during the annual “glacial period,” with a consequent reliance upon preserved material of convenient types and a great restriction of field studies. The mature student who, after four years in a divinity school, relinquished attendance upon a course in genetics because the professor's mental processes were so similar to those of his divinity teachers when they held forth on predestination, salvation through grace, etc., is cited as part of a general indictment which suggests the reflection that the best culture medium for the academic dry-rot fungus consists of about equal parts of narrow, unsympathetic specialisation, and normal or precocious senile abstraction. There are redeeming features, however, and the author rejects a friend's remedial proposal that staffs should be completely changed and buildings burnt out or thoroughly disinfected every 25 years ! Another tendency which is deplored is the migration of the American graduate to the German laboratory and the teaching of authority, instead of spending the few precious post-graduate years among the problems provided at her door by the flora and fauna of the tropics.
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Academic Biology. Nature 112, 346 (1923). https://doi.org/10.1038/112346a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/112346a0