Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/394

390 have had thorough training as a college professor, it is possible for him to retain some touch with the educational side; but if, as is usually the case, he have had no such training, his interest in educational matters is apt to become purely academic. And such a condition is fully in accord with the popular notion respecting the president's duties; the position needs a man of great executive capacity, great energy, magnetic personality, capable of keeping himself in public view, so as to advertise the university, to attract students and to increase the resources. Recently a new president was chosen for a promising young college. Interviews with trustees and others appeared promptly in the newspapers stating that with this man's magnetism, the institution will have a million dollars and a thousand students within ten years—not a word about education or elevation of grade. A notable illustration is the frequent reference to President Roosevelt as the proper successor to President Eliot of Harvard—though every thoughtful man at all familiar with university needs and objects must recognize that President Roosevelt, with all his remarkable ability, has not the qualifications required for control of a university, large or small.

Yet this officer, becoming every year less and less fitted to preside over educational affairs, becomes each year more firmly fixed as autocrat, for, if at all successful in raising money, he. soon develops into the administration. The trustees may be restless, when ignored, but that is unimportant, for they know very little about the institution, while ordinarily the trespass upon their prerogative is so gradual that no new advance is sufficient to justify decisive action. The president, originally a lawyer, clergyman or business man, has sole power over appointments of professors, over the fixing of their salaries and over the curriculum itself, for he may establish a new chair at any time. It is not too much to say that the office of college president, as it exists in most of our colleges and universities, is the great menace to higher education in America.

Effect on the professors.—The all-essential portion of the university is the teaching staff; it does the work for which the college or university was founded; all other portions of the organization, trustees, president and 'what not' were intended for the encouragement and strengthening of this staff. Under the American system, the relations have been reversed.

There seems to be a deliberate attempt to convince the community that college professors are singularly child-like in simplicity and in lack of business capacity. One president has dilated on the unworldliness of college professors, and has left the impression that he thinks low salaries not altogether bad as they tend to encourage high thinking and indifference to worldly affairs. Another describes the ideal trustee in glowing terms, he stands transfixed while contemplating the majesty