Life, 1914-08-20 · page 15 of 40
Life — August 20, 1914 — page 15: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The top cartoon jokes about a nearsighted amateur photographer using a telescope as a camera lens, making a bear appear comically close-up. The humor is visual wordplay on "arrangement." The main article satirizes universities' failure to systematically critique fallacies and flawed reasoning. The author argues that no one—students, professors, or wealthy donors funding the institution—will challenge false ideas because doing so would be seen as disrespectful to their superiors. The piece proposes creating academic "Departments of Fallacy" with authorized professors to openly identify errors in education and economics. The satirical point: universities claim to pursue truth but actually protect inherited falsehoods through institutional hierarchy and donor pressure. A such department, the author suggests, would likely be the most popular course on campus—implying academia is deeply riddled with unexamined errors.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Near-sighted Amateur: my! HOW NEAR THIS TELESCOPE ARRANGEMENT MAKES HIM LOOK! Courses in Fallacy VERBURDENED millionaires in search of puri- fying outlets for their excess possessions could do much worse than to endow chairs of fallacy in our universities. One doesn't have to be any higher in the scale of animal life than an awe- struck freshman to know that our universities, like the surrounding world of which they are micro- cosmic, are sorely beset with fallacies, The trouble is that there is no effort to attack these fallacies in a scientific manner and dispose of them. Under the present scheme of things it is bad taste, not to say disreputable, to mention them above a whisper, It is one of those everybody's businesses which is nobody’s business. Nobody has the authority. If stu- dents should take it up, they would be irreverent towards their professors; if the professors should take it up, they would be irreverent towards their most efficient money- gathering president, and if the moncy-gathering president should take it up, he would be irreverent towards those timid capitalists whose munificent endowments make the curriculum go round. But if we had Departments of Fallacy, duly authorized and organized, and in charge of expert Professors of Fal- lacy, it would be their business to unearth fallacies wher- ever they existed, both in and out of the curriculum. The fame of such a professor with his always interested band of students—and it would easily be the most popular course in college—would vary directly with their ability to revitalize the dry bones of inherited educational and economic irrationalities and to show us just exactly where and how we are getting the least return for the greatest expenditure of energy, time and money. Is any millionaire equal to the monumental importance of this educational step? By O.Ss