Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/285

Rh chosen to assume that they were dismissed for holding opinions at variance with those of the administration, but those who have been familiar with the situation have wondered less that these professors were dismissed from their positions than that were ever appointed to them. To president and faculty alike lack of frankness and freedom of expression brings needlessly harsh and often unmerited criticism.

What wonder if members of college faculties, on their part, sometimes feel that they are employees, hired by the year, with a time-card, and with a "boss" to enforce discipline; that they are clerks in a department store with the floorwalker ever present to keep them at their tasks; that they are horses in stalls conveyed by railway train to some distant point unknown to them; that they are tagged and pigeonholed in the desk of the president; that they are parts of a machine, irresponsible for the results of its work. Yet they never forget that it is also true that at rare intervals great educational leaders have arisen who by natural ability and educational training have seemed ideally qualified for the headship of great educational institutions. And it has been unfortunately true that these leaders have led where there have been few to follow. Trustees, faculty, alumni and undergraduates accustomed to the old order have feared to break with the past and have turned back again when the path has narrowed and clouds have obscured the heights.

The inorganic nature of the college and the lack of relationship among its different parts is well illustrated in the typical college campus. This is crowded with buildings representing every period of architecture known and not infrequently having buildings that utterly refuse to be classified; every variety of building material has been used in their construction; when several buildings have been erected of the same material, as of brick, the incongruities are needlessly multiplied by the use of pressed brick, tapestry brick, cream brick, and every other variety and color known to the builder; when one form of brick has been somewhat consistently used, the trimmings of granite, of white marble, or of red sandstone, or of brown sandstone, add the seemingly inevitable note of discord. Even single buildings illustrate the same spirit. One college received the gift of a physics laboratory and the building was planned by the president and a local mechanic without any consultation with the professor of physics. In another university the president secured the funds for a new library building and this he felt gave him the right to decide on the plans for it and also to select its location on the campus; incidentally, the site selected was next to the athletic field. In another college, the planning of a large lecture hall to be occupied jointly by several departments was turned over to a young architect who had never planned an educational building of any sort. Without consultation with any of the departments concerned, the plans were drawn up, the building was erected, and the