Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/618

614 of holding each professor responsible to him. The bureaucratic or department-store system of university control is the disease which is now serious and may become fatal. This subjection of the individual to the machinery of administration and to the rack wage, is but an invasion of the university by methods in business and in politics from which the whole country suffers. We may hope that it is only a temporary incident in the growth of material complexity beyond the powers of moral and intellectual control, and that man may soon regain his seat in the saddle. Certainly Harvard has led the way. It has adopted a scale of salaries independent of superficial supply and demand, and has placed them outside the influence of intrigue and favoritism. The bureaucratic system is less dominant than elsewhere. And it has its reward; for I find in an objective study of the distribution of the scientific men of the country that no less than one fifth of those most eminent are here.

It has been said more than once that the college is in danger of being crushed between the upper millstone of the professional school and the nether millstone of the secondary school; those who have used this simile do not appear to realize that this is the way fine flour is made. The trouble with our educational system is that the college has not only exploited its frivolous amateurism and its futile scholasticism at home, but it has imposed them on the high school and even on the grades. When we have high schools fit for the people and professional schools of the right sort, the college will be molded into proper shape.

President Lowell closed his inaugural address with the words:

If the temperature of the ocean were raised sufficiently, Cambridge and its university would be submerged, while the great continent with its state universities would stand untouched. But if the intellectual ambition is sound and the visions are sane Harvard College can be saved.

I trust that I have not exceeded the privileges proper to a guest or the freedom allowed by an after-dinner address. Those men and those institutions which are too great for compliment are still subject to honest criticism. It would be impertinent for me to praise Harvard University and its leaders. Harvard stands apart from and above all our other universities, secure in its past and in its future, one of the great contributions made by America to the civilization of the world.