Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/283

Rh academic freedom, teaching and pensions, are all questions of Siamese twinship. Who shall separate teaching from any other part of the educational body without thereby taking from it the breath of life?

It must be evident that the present method of collegiate organization has not only produced friction, for among all the colleges and universities located between Maine and California and between Florida and Washington the number can be counted on the fingers of one hand where there is no friction of an aggravated character either between the board of trustees and the president, or between the president and the faculty, but that it has also resulted in serious incongruities of conditions and of relationships.

Some of these incongruities are connected with the office of the president. They result from attempting to fit the round peg into the square hole and they would be amusing did they not so vitally concern our entire educational system. If a successful business man is elected the president of a college, he may inaugurate a campaign of efficiency in order to determine "just how much work each member of the educational staff is doing in the matter of instruction, what he is producing in connection with his chosen line of specialization and—in short—to determine his value to the institution as compared with that of his colleagues." If a person without even the first college degree is called to a college presidency, he may be solemnly asked in the first interview granted the representatives of the press to enunciate his views in regard to the graduate school. If a clergyman is transplanted from a city or a country parish to the presidency of a great university, he may at once begin planning for new schools of civil and mining engineering. If an eminent physician is invited to become a college president he may immediately promulgate fantastic schemes for strengthening the college by the introduction of a plan to promote friendly rivalry among the professors.

It is safe to say that if positions were reversed the incongruities would be apparent to all. No professor of mathematics would be called to the pastorate of a city church, no head of a department of modern languages would ipso facto be deemed qualified for the headship of a theological seminary, no professor of English could without special medical training receive a license to practise medicine, no professor of chemistry would be considered a qualified lawyer.

One of the most unfortunate features of the official relationship between president and faculty is that if a member of the faculty raises a question in regard to a matter of college policy it is regarded as an unjustifiable interference on his part. His question may seem to him altogether devoid of harm—he may ask in regard to the probable site of a new building, the nature of the campus hedge that is to be set out, or whether the city fathers have ordered the campus drinking water