Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/84

80 from whom the majority of us are sprung. If we seek an aim, and are not blinded by academic pride, here is one right at hand. You will not be surprised to hear that the policy of the modern department of pedagogy is to help, not to exploit, the high school. The social point of view is capable, perhaps to a greater degree than one might at first expect, of modifying our procedure in dealing with the lower schools. The chief function of a college department of pedagogy is to turn out well-prepared teachers, enthusiastic, and with the right attitude toward their work. It should not, in my judgment, lend itself to cheap advertising, or drumming up students, or making a hit with the high schools and academies. Those imbued with the social spirit will find the hundred problems of adjustment of the college to the secondary schools too vital to be dealt with in a narrow or commercial spirit.

The relation of the college to the rich is no less important than the question just discussed, if the college is to preserve the right tone towards the social needs and aspirations of the whole people. The history of European universities shows that these institutions have been used to further the political views of their founders. In Prance and Germany, for example, universities have been used almost like fortresses to hold territory gained in war, as can be shown by reference to Breslau, Strasburg, Bonn, Bordeaux, Caen and Poitiers. The numerous universities organized by Napoleon were designed to carry out his policy of government. In view of this background afforded by history one can not be indifferent to the influence of founders and patrons upon their universities. Just how the millionaire founder or the millionaire trustee affects the social relations of the college calls for more extended statement than space here permits. In a few glaring instances in this country there have been serious infringements by the wealthy supporters of a university upon the spirtspirit [sic] of academic freedom. But the predominance of the rich in the councils of the college has acted more insidiously in the social ideals that they perhaps unconsciously put upon the institution. One might mention briefly the expenditure of money from the business standpoint of the advertiser rather than from the educational standpoint of the professor; the treatment of the instructors as employees rather than as a body of self-respecting gentlemen working in a great social cause; and finally, the character of the officers likely to be chosen by trustees filled with a commercial rather than an academic spirit. A glance at the constitutions and administration of the universities in monarchical Europe as compared with these features of American universities causes no small wonder that in this country institutions of higher learning are comparatively aristocratic, not to say autocratic. The University of Oxford, for example, is governed by three bodies, council, congregation and convocation. The first, council, is made up of six heads of colleges, six leading professors, and six