Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/278

272 matters of the formation of the curriculum, standardization, election and dismissal of instructors and the like, belong naturally to the faculty, with board and student representatives, under normal conditions exercising advisory influence. It is as hazardous for boards of education to assume responsibility for the complicated institutional life of a university and exercise the fine shades of judgment needed for its success, as it would be for the ordinary university professor without the requisite years of preparation to run a bank or department store. The president should be chairman of the faculty. His proper function is primarily an executive one, and in no sense legislative or judicial. But the prerogatives of students—what are they? I recently asked a professor in a state university what power, in his judgment, students ought to have in an educational institution. He replied, "Power? Why, the power to work and work like thunder." When I argued that they were already in possession of such freedom, he retorted emphatically, "But they do not seem to know it!" No one has to urge a graduate student, interested in his problem and inspired by personal contact, to work. Usually, on the contrary, he must be restrained from too continuous application on account of his bodily health. His attitude toward instructors, tasks and institution is different. Student bodies have rarely come into possession of their own. Why should they not have full responsibility for student enterprises and social activities? How much power of the faculty, which is legally the responsible agent in such matters, should be in evidence, is an open question. Professor Payne, of the University of Virginia, where for more than a century students have successfully regulated questions of student honor, honesty and propriety, assures me that the plan is working well, just because the faculty keep their hands off entirely. Under such circumstances students are glad to regulate their own affairs, and they do it well. I know of no instance in which students have participated in the activities of an institution, wherein they have broken faith or usurped power. Still they are treated as underlings, while instructors keep school, hold examinations and administer grades. Under present conditions they are filled with ideals of military discipline rather than infused with social impulses. Why may not our universities be transformed into states in miniature or social communities, in which students are "the people," each of whom is tempted by the entire situation, to care, to lend a hand, to feel the thought currents of the time, to know men as well as books, to be efficient units in society? In this direction we must tend if our new ideals of social righteousness are to be woven into the texture of our common life.

The problem would be easy were we not tempted by the luscious sense of power and blinded by a highly developed institutionalism. The university exists for the students, and not the students for the university.