Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/188

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HIS president has been reading an article in the for May entitled "The Small College and Its President"—hence these words.

Probably it is rarely the case, when a number of alumni, each more than fifty years of age, foregather and begin to talk over old times, that some one doesn't tell the story of the time he and others put a cow in the college chapel. These stories can not all be true—there haven't been cows enough. Probably they are more or less fictitious variants of some fundamental cow-myth which originated under those vague conditions commonly described as "mists of antiquity." In a similar way it may fairly be questioned whether the awful condition described in the article to which allusion has been made really exists in concrete form and precisely as set forth in any particular institution.

If there is a college such as is described in this May article it should certainly be abolished at once. It is a disgrace to the whole system of education in America. It is very difficult to believe that, because of their athletic prowess, athletes are given marks higher than they deserve. It is difficult to believe that the sons of wealthy patrons are unfairly marked in the professors' classbooks and on the registrar's records. Whatever trustees and faculties might think, no body of normal undergraduates would stand for any such treatment of that larger part of their number neither athletic nor rich.

But the object of this writing is to describe briefly another small college which is believed to be more nearly like the typical American small college. It is something less than one hundred years old. Its undergraduate body numbers perhaps less than three hundred. It is governed by a rather large board of trustees. All but two of them are college graduates, and most of them are graduates of the college over which they now preside. It includes clergymen, lawyers or judges, and business men—bankers, insurance men, manufacturers, merchants—in proportion as the numbers 10, 16 and 20. It is under no ecclesiastical control. The president of the college is ex-officio president of this board of trustees. His powers are nowhere stated or defined in the charter or statutes of the college. It takes a two-thirds vote of the trustees to dismiss him, and he is ex officio a member of various committees. He has two votes in the faculty if he cares to use them—one regularly and