Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/458

454 of our thirty-one small colleges only nine have chosen laymen to the presidency.

Most of these colleges are, of course, still under denominational control, and while such is not the case with our college, tradition demands that a clergyman fill the presidential chair. This tradition is doubtless a survival from the days when ours also was a strictly denominational college. We still have a large clientéle in the state who cherish the fear that the choosing of a layman for the presidency would be the last step in the secularization, and therefore the demoralization of the college, that it would thenceforth lose its character as a Christian college and would become "Godless" in its tendencies. Just how sectarianism contributes to the development of Christian character is not explained, nor is it made satisfactorily clear in what way a wise and well-trained teacher would fall short as an executive. Sooner or later this ministerial tradition must be dispensed with, for we must eventually realize that the only truly competent executive is the one who has "been through the mill" and has risen to the presidency from the ranks of college teachers; nor will the character of the college as a Christian institution suffer in the least by the appointment of such a man. Bather is it likely that our Christianity may take on a somewhat deeper tone, and find its vent in somewhat more practical manifestations. There may come to be less preaching and more performance, less self-conscious talk about the state of one's soul, and at the same time less cheating in examinations; for present experience indicates that religion of the current type and dishonesty of a conventional sort are not at all incompatible. Our inherited brand of Christianity is sincere but narrow, issuing at best in a personal righteousness that fails to take account of the broader social responsibilities confronting the present age. It is to be hoped that our college will ere long cast aside its theological leading strings and grow into something broader and better than its present pseudo-sectarianism.

Undoubtedly one of the worst effects of our president's failure to recognize scholarship as our goal is its demoralizing effect on members of the faculty. Left to themselves, there is no doubt that our teachers would pursue scholarship as the end and aim of their professional efforts. But as things stand at present, those who engage in this lofty pursuit are neither encouraged nor appreciated. Our president wants "rustlers"—men who are ready at a day's notice to leave their classes and go out on a financial campaign or a student canvass, men who are continually in the lime-light, attending committee meetings, speaking to student gatherings, devising changes in the man-millinery which is the outward and visible sign of our high calling, addressing questionnaires to the rest of the faculty on all sorts of unimportant topics, tacking up notices in the halls, rushing officiously from place to place, and making themselves generally as conspicuous as possible. Our president is a fanatic on the subject of "efficiency," by which term he means