Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/414

410 of 63. The writer has gathered numerous catalogues and appeals during the last two years and he can present other illustrations of the same type. Whether or not a state should permit multiplication of such colleges may not seem to many to be an open question.

The real colleges and universities should come to an honest recognition of the fact that they were founded to produce mental, not physical athletes; college authorities and they alone are responsible for the common belief that, in college, intellectual work is less important than physical. "Methods of the shop" are denounced by many college presidents and by many professors as degrading; but nowhere are those methods more conspicuous than in colleges themselves. The only evidence of success, apparently, is increased enrollment, more funds, more houses, more low-priced teachers. Quantity, not quality. College presidents and professional canvassers hawk their wares as blatantly as criers at a fair; advertisements are placed in journals and circulars are sent broadcast, extolling the advantages of the institution as shrewdly as though the wares were oriental rugs; students entrusted to college authorities for mental training are utilized for advertising purposes and the college controls the process. Many colleges have a special exhibition day, when prospective students are invited to inspect the concern. Students, once gained, have an inordinate sense of their importance and resent regulation by the faculty as interference with their rights. Strikes among college boys are becoming only too familiar and the plague has found its way into high, even into grammar schools. Discipline is weakened and young Americans at college are growing up in a school of disobedience and evasion.

College trustees must change their methods; they must acquire a new conception of duty and must remember that they are custodians of a great trust for whose honest management they are responsible. The fact that under present conditions there is none to call them to account should make their sense of personal honor more acute. A trustee should endeavor to familiarize himself with the kind and extent of work done by professors, and should not consent to accept only such information as the president may think proper to present. It is little short of scandalous that great universities with thousands of students and vast properties should be controlled by men who are utterly ignorant of the work which is done or which might to lie done. There is no hope for American colleges, unless their affairs can be placed in charge of sympathetic trustees, who will recognize their personal limitations and will concede gladly that not they, hut the faculties are the university. Great railroad companies have been wrecked because financiers on the board of directors insisted on managing the road according to their notions through a financier president; other great companies have been rescued from destruction by repentant boards, who confined