Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/617

Rh work. But if the points for the degree are weighted as well as counted, the able student or the diligent student will make more rapid progress. If he can do in two or three years the work for which the poorer student requires four years, there is no reason why he should not go forward to the professional or graduate school. It would also be just and a proper stimulus to let good students pay lower and poor students higher fees in proportion to the quality of their work. The good students who profit themselves and contribute to a better spirit in the institution should receive a larger part of the subsidy contributed for college education, while the students who learn but little and may be a public nuisance should not be supported at college at public expense.

But the best reward for scholarly work is adequate recognition of the work as preparation for a career in life. At Columbia University a man takes his doctor's degree at the average age of 27 years. He is fortunate if he receives immediately an instructorship at $1,000 a year; the increments of salary are $100 a year for ten years, so that at the age of 37 he receives a salary of $2,000. In a commercial community the imagination is not stirred by such figures. The university is a parasite on the scholarly impulse instead of a stimulus to it.

The first need of our universities and colleges is great men for teachers. In order that the best men may be drawn to the academic career, it must be attractive and honorable. The professorship was inherited by us as a high office which is now being lowered. Professors and scholars are not sufficiently free or sufficiently well paid, so there is a lack of men who deserve to be highly rewarded, and we are in danger of sliding down the lines of a vicious spiral, until we reach the stage where the professor and his scholarship are not respected because they are not respectable.

I should myself prefer to see the salaries, earnings and conveyings of others cut down rather than to have the salaries of professors greatly increased. When a criminal lawyer—to use the more inclusive term for corporation lawyer—receives a single fee of $800,000, our civilization is obviously complicated. Every professor who is as able as this lawyer and who does work more important for society can not be paid a million dollars a year. But neither is it necessary to pay him so little that he can not do his work or educate his children. I recently excused myself somewhat awkwardly for not greeting promptly the wife of a colleague by saying that men could not be expected to recognize women because they changed their frocks. She replied: "The wives of professors don't." It is better to have wit than frocks; but in the long run they are likely to be found together.

The first step of a really great university president would be to refuse to accept a larger salary than is paid to the professors. The second step would be to make himself responsible to the faculty