Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/321

Rh presiding officer, through the latter's anxiety to save some notable athlete or the scion of some family of wealth or high social standing, himself to appear the delinquent, either in the artifice of detecting cheats or in the art of teaching those that will not to learn if they can possibly help it. Even stronger than any of these other motives may be the desire of the individual officer, if he is the nominal head of the entire show, to be popular with the "boys" and with their parents, the alumni and other constituency of the institution. And so long as such a large proportion of these "friends" (?) look leniently upon, if they do not largely indulge themselves in, the practise of these same vices, how can any one lonely man stand against the multitude for firmness and due severity in discipline? But a body of men like the faculties, or their selected committees, in a great institution, is much more likely than any one man can be, to administer even-handed justice, tempered with reasonable mercy. While, then, I am by no means prepared to quote with unlimited assent the following declaration taken from a pamphlet, entitled "The Demoralization of College Life": "College presidents are not willing to enforce the law or even to allow it to be enforced when it will cause them to lose students, especially rich and influential ones." I am fairly confident in the belief that the total elimination of even the appearance of one-man power or influence would greatly improve the morale of the student body. And this morale, whatever is to be said about it as compared with other countries and earlier days in this country, is certainly quite too low at the present time. It can be raised, and that without any very severe difficulties; and it would, in no very long time, be raised, if the men in the university faculties who sincerely want to see it raised, were given a free hand. Perhaps they might not have the "nerve" at once so to check the extravagance of college athletics as to make it no longer possible to spend a half-million dollars on a single game of bootball; or difficult for the sons of impecunious teachers or country parsons to embarrass their parents by calling for a goodly slice out of their salaries, in order to attend in proper style a dance that rivals in magnificence a state-ball at Government-House in Calcutta.

But is not the present prevailing form of university administration the only one under which the trustees, corporation or otherwise named governing board, can successfully discharge their part of the administrative functions? In these days, universities can not grow in other respects unless they grow in their finances. And there is something appalling, even to the multimillionaire, in the remorseless appetite of the American university for an ever larger expenditure of money. The trustees by advising and assisting the president, and by answering generously to a certain obligation put upon, or gently hinted to them, when they are chosen to the position of trustees, are supposed to be under obligation to oversee the getting and the expenditure of the