Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/396

392 the giver who has shown desire to meddle with 'professorial freedom.' But there is a subordination which the writer knows leads young men to despise the professor's calling, leads them, in Mr. Monroe's words, to look with scorn upon a calling in which the individual is annihilated. The president, too often a graduate from one of the narrowest courses in college, too often belonging for much of his later life to a dogmatic profession, has power to make and does make appointments on his own motion to chairs in literature, philosophy as well as in pure and applied science; he controls promotions and salaries; the professors are subordinate to him individually as the faculties are collectively. Young men, knowing the conditions, refuse to enter the calling; others, ignorant of them, spend years in preparation and enter the calling only to find, when too late to escape, that their ideal was as a will o' the wisp.

The assertion is made that, were it not for this control, professors would become perfunctory in their work. Some kind of control is needed even for the best of men that matters be not at loose ends, but it should be intelligent to be efficient. A successful business man, an eminent lawyer, a great clergyman, would not prove efficient as superintendent of a shop for grinding microscope lenses or for manufacturing chronometers. And if occasionally he expressed opinions belittling the skill required for the work or showed preference for quantity rather than for quality of work, his control would be of doubtful value. This is a condition in too many colleges, with the result that the president is on one side, the faculty on the other, with nothing but distrust in common.

It is strange that so few college professors become perfunctory in their work. They receive little personal recognition. If they exert themselves to build up the library, museum or apparatus, if they induce an acquaintance to give an endowment, all these are so many packages thrown into the president's basket of achievements. Their services are not acknowledged even in a material way. Their salaries are petty; the salary of a rowing coach in a great university is larger than that of an assistant professor who has done efficient work for many years; in case of urgent deficit, the first relief suggested is in reduction of the professors' salaries. In other professions, experience and efficiency lead to promotion; in this other matters prevail, and too often a young man, untried, is appointed at higher salary than that received by older men of well-ascertained efficiency. It is surprising that so few men come to share the apparent opinion of president, trustees and many students that their work is of only incidental importance. Yet there is no reason why college professors should be more transcendental than other men.

These statements may seem strange to many persons of wealth. The needs of the 'poor self-denying professor' are exploited so