Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/286

282 members of the faculty moved in. That some rooms were to be used for classes in mathematics and others for work in modern languages and still others for English had apparently in no way affected the plans.

Nor are these conditions necessarily due to differences in the period* at which college buildings have been erected—they prevail on more than one campus where the greater number of buildings have been erected in a single generation during the incumbency of a single president. Xor are they always due to the selection of different architects—in more than one instance a single architect has planned the greater number of the buildings of a college campus, yet he has been the chief of sinners in including among the buildings he has planned those that range in style from the classical period through the gothic, romanesque and renaissance to a Queen Anne house, a French château, or a feudal castle for the president.

The Architectural Record has recently published a series of articles by Montgomery Schuyler on the architecture of American colleges and more than one of the articles has emphasized the lack of harmony and the absence of a consistent plan in the buildings of a college campus. The author writes of one college:

The architecture of college buildings and the planning of a college campus may not seem to come within the range of a discussion of the next college president, but in fact nothing else in the domain of education seems to illustrate so well and so vividly the incongruities of the educational system itself. What the college is in brick and mortar, that the college is in its organization and in its educational plan. He who runs may read the incongruities of the college campus, but he who loiters has perceived but dimly, if at all, the intellectual incongruities reflected through it.

In view of these conditions who shall be the next college president? A former university president at the recent inauguration of one of his successors enumerates some twenty qualifications that should be found in the man who fills the office, although he states that "the qualities which enter into the making of an ideal college president are very widely distributed and never can be found represented in a great many men."

The members of a college faculty are ready to accept this statement of the difficulty of finding the ideal college president. But unlike members of boards of trustees they are concerning themselves not with candidates for the position of president, but with the organization of