Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/404

400 and will afford opportunity to acquire enough knowledge to let the youth rise above mere muscular labor; but even this is still far below the demand, for college or professional education is in no sense essential to the attainment of wealth, of political or social distinction or even of great usefulness. There is no more of real charity in endowing a college than in endowing a great hospital, open to rich and poor alike, at nominal or no cost, on the basis of first come, first served.

For colleges are conducted on that principle, as are some dispensaries which make no investigation respecting needs of applicants, and the "charity" appeals for aid in proportion to the amount of business done. No properly equipped college can subsist on the fees as now arranged; each simply doles out alms to rich and poor alike, presenting them in many cases to men who would scorn a gift in money. Too often, a college in appealing for more endowment is asking wealthy men and women to aid it in giving the college course to the children of other wealthy men and women at a fraction of the cost. The condition is worse in the case of professional schools, in which the fees should always cover the cost; the more so, since there is no pressing need for more lawyers, physicians or even clergymen. In this, there is no criticism of those who endow professorships or free scholarships, provided always that they do so wisely. Scholarships should never be given, they should be earned in competitive examination. A professorship should be endowed so generously as to make the salary attractive to ambitious men who have been accustomed to comfortable surroundings; if the income be so small as to be attractive only to those who have served an apprenticeship in poverty, the gift is injurious. Teaching is not the only function of a college; the professors should be investigators also; the man who does not make original studies becomes a dealer in second-hand knowledge, a mere lesson hearer; whatever his salary may be, it is enough. Up to thirty years ago, a stream of contributions to knowledge flowed from the colleges; a great part of the country's advance, intellectual as well as physical, is directly traceable to that stream. But, during later years, the importance of increased enrollment and the necessity for accommodating the increasing number of students without increasing the expenditure or the fees have overshadowed all else; the efficiency system of the factory is applied, the hours of teaching have increased in many cases to beyond those required in the public schools; so that college men of the present generation have neither time nor energy to do such work as was done by their predecessors. Any unrestricted endowment gift which may be utilized to provide an additional number of low-priced instructors so as to accommodate an increased number of students at cheap rates is destructive.

And here one touches the real disease affecting American colleges. There has been a gradual lowering of the actual, not professed,