Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/289

Rh In more than one line of public business he sees evidences of a friendly desire for cooperation between business managements and the general public.

It is probable that few persons, even few college professors, avail themselves of these privileges or heed these invitations and even urgent entreaties. Yet the very fact that such opportunities are given the public is at once a safeguard to the organization making them in that it forestalls carping criticism, and at the same time it affords an outlet to the ill humors that would otherwise poison the minds of even reasonable men. The situation is precisely the same as that involved in the resumption of specie payments, as long as men can not get a dollar in gold for every dollar of paper money they hold, they will continue to demand gold; when every paper dollar can be redeemed in gold at its face value, men prefer the more convenient paper bills to the gold coin.

But no "book of suggestions" now hangs in the office of a college president, no slips calling for ideas are circulated by boards of trustees among college faculties, no invitations to report leaks, screws loose, or balky window shades are sent out by managers of college buildings, no notice is posted in any college building asking college professors to register complaints of the failure of other college employees to have the lantern ready at the hour appointed for the lecture or to set up on time a piece of apparatus necessary for an important experiment.

Then, too, the college professor would like to have the next college president not only listen to his suggestions, but even go so far as to occasionally ask him for opinions! As it is, the college president when he first meets his faculty and in his public inaugural address states his own conception of the function of a college and outlines what his policy is to be in connection with the particular institution over which he has been called on to preside. It is not on record that he has ever asked the members of the faculty what their opinions are on these questions. He may not be an alumnus of the college or have ever served on its faculty, yet election to the presidency of an institution with which he has no personal connection and with whose history he can have been but imperfectly acquainted is assumed to endow him with omniscience and his utterances are received as those of a prophet. The college professor would sometimes like to play the role of prophet!

The near-professor passed a pleasant hour as he reorganized the office of the college presidency, and then he turned to his Quentin Durward and to the conversation between the Scot and the Bohemian who boasted of his liberty.

 "But you are subject to instant execution, at the pleasure of the Judge." "Be it so," returned the Bohemian; "I can but die so much the sooner." "And to imprisonment also," said the Scot; "and where, then, is your boasted freedom?"

"In my thoughts," said the Bohemian, "which no chains can bind."