Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/561

Rh room, he howls and even cusses on the foot-ball field—and if he does not do these things, you and your callow sons will rise up to boycott him and dub him "uppish."

But if professors are not overburdened with personal dignity, the sense of dignity and the right to be respected and heard as a body in the faculty is positively wanting. This is true not only in a few schools, but, almost without exception, in all. The trouble, as indicated, lies as much with the professors themselves as with others. Faculties have failed to demand respect for their views and findings. The average faculty does not respect its own decrees. As Americans, I assume, our (respect for law may be taken to be nil, but the intelligence of the allwise faculty should dictate some respect at least for their own laws. But they have none. Oh, there are a few schools which have codified the rulings passed from time to time by the faculty, but in the great majority of cases no one in the school knows anything about past legislation. It might be found, possibly, by running through the faculty minutes of the past years, but who would be so foolish as to do that when it is so easy simply to "knock off" a new law whenever the need arises, and thus make the law von Fall zu Fall, as Bismarck made politics.

What the college "senate," as we sometimes proudly call the faculty, needs is a sense of dignity as a body, after the fashion of the original "senate" which wrote its own name first in the proud phrase Senatus Populusque Romanus. Far be it from the American college senate to write its name ahead of anything! This is the style it employs: The Students, Administration, the Janitors and the Senate of So and So. Most faculty men are too jealous of each other and of their "stand in" with the administration ever to pull together in anything that makes for strength in the faculty. Then there are, of course, the invertebrates and the weak whom ye have with ye alway; but that brings me to another chapter.

It is the chapter entitled: Scholarship not wanted in America! There are various reasons for this ukase which has gone forth. First, men of real scholarship might some time take it into their heads really to make the sons of fond parents study. Such old-fashioned notions would mean calamity—calamity to culture, because to get culture you must do nothing for at least four years. As the average small college has it: a four-years' loaf makes a well-bred man. Calamity to education for citizenship, for education for citizenship, as the cry is now penetrating to the small college, means, I fear: athletics, social intercourse, random talks by lawyers, politicians; a lot of frothy stuff about the glory and responsibility of citizenship, without the first idea of obedience to law and institutions, the very crown and cornerstone of good citizenship, without that most essential asset in the citizen; the power to do prolonged hard work.