Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/393

Rh As Dr. Draper is not speaking of the small college with one hundred students, no one will be disposed to dispute his assertion that the position calls for a rare man. It may be added that a board of trustees competent to make intelligent choice of this rare man would be composed of still rarer men. If they should be fortunate enough to find him they could not keep him, for such ability is in demand, and some life insurance company would soon offer him several times the salary for a small fraction of the work. Undoubtedly Dr. Draper has summarized the requirements as they are idealized in some minds and no doubt there are men who feel assured that he has described the work they actually do, the whole work of the trustees as well as the whole internal work of the institution aside from teaching. Beyond all question, there are those who attempt this. But appointments are not made on the basis of this rare, broad qualification. The only question is as to the candidate's ability to meet the requirement which the board thinks most urgent—usually one which in the list seems to be of rather secondary importance. And one may not censure the board for this. As the number of colleges is far beyond the country's needs, financial stringency is ordinarily the only requirement with which the trustee is familiar. The selection, as a rule, is not made because the candidate is qualified to control an educational institution, but rather without any reference to that matter. As a rule the appointee is not a teacher. He is apt to entertain great respect for education and none too much for educating or educators.

The newly-appointed president may or may not have an ideal—that is unimportant. He finds quickly, except in some of the older universities, that the board of trustees has an ideal; that board expects a commercial success, more money, more students. The president's path is marked out for him; he is not to be successor to Hopkins, Witherspoon or Day; he is to be a wandering mendicant, exposed to rebuffs and disappointments of the most galling type; he is to feel that prospective heirs look on him as attempting to rob the widow and orphan. However sharply one may assert that the president's office, as it now exists, is an injury to higher education, he must recognize the heroic sense of duty which prevents so many presidents from abandoning their posts.

The most serious matter in this connection is the complete alienation of the president from the work of teaching. In the smaller institutions, where he is still professor of some branch of philosophy, his work as teacher is wholly subordinate to that as traveling collector of funds. In the larger universities, teaching is impossible, and the president is simply managing officer of a great corporation, with buttons on his desk which keep him in touch with managers of departments. His work is purely administrative, and in the very nature of the case he comes to regard all within the corporation's range as his subordinates. If he