Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/460

456 grew up a form of college organization, adequate enough for its day, but fraught with potentialities of serious danger for the future. The president, in that early time, although usually a clergyman, was a teacher also, and met classes like the rest of the faculty. His was not then a position of great power. He was primus inter pares—the senior member of the faculty and the presiding officer in its meetings—not the Czar that he has since become. The American college was poor in those days, and its scanty funds were held in trust by a body of men who, that they might be impersonal and disinterested, were chosen from outside the college. As the college grew in wealth this group of trustees grew in importance, and gradually assumed not simply the investment of college funds, but the actual management of the college itself. Needing a representative within the college, they naturally chose the president, conferring on him autocratic authority, and correspondingly curtailing the power of the faculty. Thus grew up, gradually, a makeshift system of college government that could hardly be worse. The wonder is not that it works so poorly; the wonder is that it works at all; yet for many generations this system has been reduplicated all over the United States with scarcely a thought of the possibility of an improvement. Our college is merely one of the many that have copied this viciously undemocratic model, incorporating its worst features into their charters.

Trustees, president and faculty alike suffer from this bad condition of things. The faculty, being debarred from the exercise of their natural functions, become firebrands of discontent, or relapse in fatalistic apathy, or become parasitic sycophants fawning on president and trustees for such crumbs of favor as may now and then be thrown in their direction. In general they feel keenly that something is amiss, but fail to analyze the situation and locate the trouble. Yet the situation is not difficult of analysis. The key to it lies in the fact that the college is governed by men who lack the technical experience necessary to govern it well, and the faculty, who possess this technical experience, are barred from any effective share in its management.

The president makes a sincere effort to make a fair and equitable adjustment of the budget to the needs of the departments, but he fails, and that for a number of reasons. In the first place, he lacks the technical knowledge necessary to an understanding of the needs of the departments. In the second place, he is under the influence of the trustees with their passion for expansion and inflation; and he is continually trying to make a big showing by putting the funds that should go to the strengthening of existing departments into the creation of new ones, or into advertising. Thus the older departments are deprived of needed equipment (the students of course being the ultimate sufferers) and salaries are kept below-the efficiency level. In the third place he fails because he enjoys too large a measure of irresponsible power. It is the fashion nowadays to compare the college to an