Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/279

Rh That the college president "is bearing up well" under these manifold duties and responsibilities and that unlike his brother politician in the state he does not "view the present situation with alarm" there is abundant evidence on every side to prove. He has in the first place written two or three books on the subject—that the number is so limited is in itself perhaps indicative of the insignificant part the whole subject takes in his mind. A more extended source of information is found in the memoirs of college presidents who have taken the public into their confidence. Occasionally the college president has written an anonymous magazine article; in one of these he has enlarged on the perplexities of his position, which he likens to those of a stage-coach driver compelled to prod one lazy horse into doing his share of the work while at the same time trying to prevent another spirited one from kicking over the traces. The near-professor was a near-instructor at the time he read this particular article, but he still vividly recalls the strong desire he felt to urge the college president to give up stage-coach driving for a living and get another job.

But the college president, unlike the college professor, seldom finds it necessary or wishes to conceal his identity. Educational reviews, educational associations, the inaugurations of brother presidents, and public educational functions of every description give him abundant opportunity to express his opinions in regard to the present distribution of powers between president and faculty and to give his general approval of the principle "it's heads I win and tails you lose."

At a somewhat recent inauguration of a university president, the previous incumbent of the position gave an address on "The University Presidency." In this he states that "the president must mark out his official course for himself and bear the responsibility of it without cavil. He can not expect that the work he has to do will make everybody happy. It will discomfit many. In one way or another they will give him all the trouble they can." This statement seems so absolutely final as to make it unnecessary to add further illustrations, many though there be at command.

But extreme as this statement of a former university president must seem to all who take an active interest in the organization of our educational system, much as these extreme statements are in themselves to be deprecated, irritating and exasperating as must seem the official relationships between college president and college faculty in view of this apparently prevailing conception of the college presidency as held by the college president, it must, after all, never be forgotten, even by those who suffer from the system, that the college president of to-day is the victim of the very virtues of his official predecessors. An overconscientious desire to do all that he should has often led him to undertake more than he can accomplish; a real desire to save his colleagues