Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/102

98 plans to the university as to its opportunities in relation to the state.

Doubtless there are other lines also in which volunteer committees of interested men and women could be of equal service to the university, to the student body, and to the state at large, but these are enough to illustrate the possibility involved.

The one point which needs to be made clear is this, that every member of the university faculty ought to have a chance to share in some real way in the determination of the policies of the university, and in shaping its integral social destiny. Otherwise, such members will either dry up into mere scholastic bean-pods in which their knowledge will rattle around, or else they will become disgusted with the bare formalities of the university and resign to go into work that offers larger opportunities for the use of real intelligence.

Complaint is often heard that faculty meetings are lifeless and dry. The reason is that the committee work of the average faculty is monopolized by a few members who take the attitude of dictators of policies, which the many are expected to follow; these being asked, at stated intervals, to come in from their scholastic duties to vote to confirm the determination of the makers of the policies. The arguments of committee members are usually dogmatic and dictatorial under this system, and the question of the non-committee members are usually scholastic and formal, for they have usually no interest in and little knowledge of the subject.

Now no man can be a real teacher in his class room, in the larger social sense demanded by our modern world, who has not had some share in determining the actual conditions and policies under which that class-room work is conducted. Every man worthy of being a teacher is worthy of having some part in determining the conditions under which he teaches. Every man worthy of having a position in a university at all has some intelligence with reference to the organization and the educational policy of such an institution. In so far as he has such intelligence the state is being defrauded if that intelligence is not called into use in helping to determine policies. Aristocratic conceptions of authority should not blind us to these facts.

Certainly there is nothing more anomalous in all our modern world than an undemocratic character in the very institutions which we boast of as being the training schools of democracy. How such undemocratic institutions fail to train for real democratic living is being shown in the fact of the all but complete failure of the school in relation to democratic living. Certainly the schools, and especially the university, ought to be able to work out processes of real democratic administration within themselves as the chief centers of democratic progress.

Such a plan, as proposed above, with all the corollaries implied but not expressed, is very possible of execution. Not only is it possible, but