Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/281

Rh win a wavering man to the side of law and order while suspicion and distrust send him to the side of lawlessness and crime. But no hope seems to be held out for the college faculty—it ever hears from the platform and through the press that it is incapable of doing business and the discouraging feature of the situation is that the American college faculty is coming to believe it.

It is also asserted that the college professor does not wish to take a larger part than he now has in the direction of educational policy. "I have heard a good deal about the growing impatience at the amount of business detail forced on the faculty because of this faculty form of government" is the statement made by a university president. "By far the greatest number in every faculty neither desire to assume administrative burdens nor are extraordinarily competent for such tasks" is the opinion of another president. Even so eminent a man as ei-President Eliot has shown much solicitude on this point when he says:

The near-professor from the safe retreat of his desk in the middle west ventures to ask by what authority ex-President Eliot presumes to speak for the American college professor, why he assumes that the election of a college president, once in say forty years, should be a more serious reduction in the attractiveness of the scholar's life than is a vote every four years for the electors of the federal president, why the cooperative annual arrangement of the budget of an institution should be a greater infringement on the professional career than is the unaided preparation of the domestic budget with a limited salary and a growing family, why the implication is made that it is only professors of bad quality who grasp at things so far beyond their reach as the selection of professors and other teachers, and why indeed a representative of Puritan New England could imagine that even a college professor would falter in his duty if that duty led him for a brief period from the attractiveness of the scholar's life into the more arduous paths heretofore trodden alone by the college president.

Another reason assigned is the infirmities of temper charged up to the college professor. One president complains:

Another reports that he has to deal with men "not altogether ripe for translation." It is a member of a board of trustees who arraigns the entire faculty over which he and his fellow trustees exercise jurisdiction with the seven deadly sins of "jealousy," "bickerings," "professional