Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/565

Rh final upshot is, then, that the students are made the supreme judges instead of the faculty; and that the professors are put on the natural competitive basis. And though their salaries are still paid by the corporation, the commercial principle is really in vogue, and its nominally becoming so is only a question of time. I remember a significant incident which took place during the last year of my attendance at the University of Michigan. It happened, accidentally, that two students published somewhat severe criticisms on the teaching of the professors in political economy and philosophy. Immediately afterward one of the professors, a very agreeable gentleman of the old school, educated in Germany, and a philosophical imperialist and absolutist to the core, delivered his sentiments on the subject. Amid the mingled cheers and hisses of his pupils, he attacked the presumption of the critical students. It was evident that in his mind things were going very badly. To him there was something wrong about a universe in which young men were permitted to have different opinions from their elders; and it is hardly too much to say that he was enraged. I could not help sympathizing with the vain struggles of an order which is rapidly passing away under the inevitable law of competition, and which, indeed, ought to pass away. And the resistance of President McCosh to any concessions to liberalism is an instinctive recognition of the fact that when they are once begun there is no ending. There is no stopping-place, no compromise, between the ancient system and that wherein every student chooses his studies and his teachers, and pays therefor. The small wedge of option being once introduced, there are incessant change and disturbance till this natural equilibrium is reached. If any one institution possessed an overpowering influence, its authority might check the advance for a time, but the competition for public favor between the five or six leading universities is so keen that each one is forced onward; and individuals, however conservative, and however many the degrees and titles that trail after their names, are unable to prevent the rapid adaptation of educational establishments to the demands of the public.

It has been the object of this paper to call attention to the facts that great endowed institutions of learning have not been efficient in the diffusion of knowledge, or as a means of intellectual progress; that, latterly, they have been useless and obstructive to the general march of society toward improvement; that the current system in America is an importation from Europe, and bears a scant relation to our requirements; that our colleges resemble, in their retrogressive characteristics and influences, their elder sisters in Europe; that their status in society is due rather to a superstition than to work performed; and that there is every reason to believe that educational facilities offered on a purely commercial basis, to which the elective system in the end inevitably comes, would be less costly to society as a whole, perhaps even less costly to students, and far more