Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/274

268 Members of faculties are also human. They have acquired all the power that has been relegated to them by constituencies and boards of education, and have picked up whatever else they could acquire on their own account. They have sometimes watched their chances to share the responsibilities of the institution with the president, lest it should weigh too heavily upon him. Some one has happily said that no Irishman could be found in Ireland so poor but that he has not some other Irishman dependent upon him. Presidents and faculties together have come into the position of almost entire separation from the student body. They have the attitude of ruler and ruled. They march in stately parades, begowned in robes of dignity and state before the admiring eyes of the students; they run the institution; they dispense grades and degrees as parsimoniously as possible to students who devote their college career to earning these marks and badges as economically as possible.

4. In the fourth place, competition has played its part in bringing about centralized authority. It has been necessary for institutions to act and act quickly in the raising of funds, in the employment of instructors and in appeals to the public. The matter of winning out in the contest has led us to do much as a hive of bees in creating a queen. We have done everything in our power to produce presidents who are masterful, who can appear well, who can be "drawing cards" in tempting into our institutions the guileless youth of the land. There is no one who will dispute that our university and college presidents are of the noblest of our people. But we are creating them at too high a cost. It is the fundamental axiom of our entire educational system that the end is not so much to produce leaders as to lift the level of all. It is growing too late in the history of democracy in the world to need to argue the point. Still an analogy will be in place. Christianity, during the first century, was a spiritual brotherhood. In the second and third centuries, they began to have conventions, and it was the custom for a bishop and at least one layman to represent a church or diocese. By the fourth century, the laymen had been almost forgotten in their councils; and from that time on the power became more and more centralized in the hands of a few of the highest officials of the church. The consequence is a familiar fact of history. From the fifth century, for several centuries following, the organization of Christendom was a closed system with neither change nor progress. It existed not for mankind as persons, but for itself and its own institutional ideals. In our educational system the laity, the students in our universities, have long since lost their voice. Our educational elders, let us say, that is, members of faculties, have been little consulted in our national association of universities that are taking upon themselves the right to determine the educational policies of the country. We are living in a