Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/339

Rh Yet this tinge of hopefulness tends to fade when the same writer records that the

Czar of Russia has restored to the professors the right to elect their rectors and deans at the same time that the trustees of one of the largest American universities have taken the vested right to elect their deans from the faculties without even asking their opinion or communicating to them their fiat.

The same writer says:

The administration imposed on universities, colleges and school systems is not needed by them, but simply represents an inconsiderate carrying over of methods current in commerce and politics. The private institutions of the east, with Chicago and Stanford, have been dependent on gifts from the modern knights of industry, and the state institutions have been dependent on legislative appropriations. It is no wonder that the methods of commerce and politics have infected them. We have an absolute and absentee board of trustees, with sometimes a small group that takes an active interest in the situation, but usually an almost complete delegation of legislative, judicial and executive functions to one man, the president. When the wisdom of letting a man lord it over an aggregate of employees instead of conferring with a company of scholars is questioned, the answer is the efficiency with which the autocrat gets things done. The president gets money and students, and builds marble palaces. . . . The marble palaces may be mausoleums for the preservation of the corpses of dead ideas and monuments erected to the decay of learning.

Another student of the field—not a professor—wholly disinterested and surely unprejudiced tells us that

Young men of power and ambition scorn what should be reckoned the noblest of professions, not because that profession condemns them to poverty, but because it dooms them to a sort of servitude.

And again:

Unless American college teachers can be assured that they are no longer to be looked upon as mere employees paid to do the bidding of men who, however courteous or however eminent, have not the faculty's professional knowledge of the complicated problems of education, our universities will suffer increasingly from a dearth of strong men, and teaching will remain outside the pale of the really learned professions. The problem is not one of wages; for no university can become rich enough to buy the independence of any man who is really worth purchasing.

Lastly I shall cite at length and should like to cite in full a notable editorial in the Dial. The writer notes, as do others, that the vital difficulty lies in our mode of thinking about these problems:

Material and commercial modes of thinking prevail so largely in our national consciousness, and impose themselves so masterfully upon our narrowed imagination, that most people are ready to accept without hesitation their extension into the domain of our intellectual concerns, particularly into that of the great concern of education. Why, it is naively asked, why should not the methods that we apply with such pronounced success to the management of a bank or a railway prove equally efficient in the management of a