Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/189

Rh another in the case of a tie. To the faculty, which consists of all the permanent officers of instruction, is, by the statutes, "committed the government of the students." This term "government" is considered to include both the disciplinary and the instructional functions of the college officers.

The courses of study, prepared originally by the faculty, are prescribed by the supreme governing body and changes are from time to time made by the faculty under the authority of the trustees. Within ten years at least there has been no case in which the wishes of the faculty in these matters have been overruled by the trustees.

It is probably true that the president has a good deal of practical authority. It is based upon nothing except the feeling of the faculty that as the president is in a peculiarly responsible position both to the trustees and to the public, because his view is necessarily wider and more comprehensive than that of the professors through his relation to the public, because there are after all other considerations than those of any particular classroom which must affect the college policies—for these and other reasons his wishes are entitled to some weight. The president has no veto over the action of the faculty. For many years there was a provision giving him this authority. It was repealed at the request of an earlier president, and the present president refused to have it restored when some of the trustees were rather disposed to restore it.

As for the unhappy athletes in this small college it is unquestionably true that they get less consideration than anybody else. Any excuse asked by an athlete, or request for special consideration, any explanation of failure or misconduct offered by such a person is regarded with peculiar suspicion—almost enough to justify the statement in a very amusing book of college stories that "a college professor always hates a man who weighs over one hundred and seventy-five pounds."

Similarly, it is unthinkable that this faculty should modify a student's marks according to the social or financial prominence of his family. One of the most excruciating and most frequent tasks of the president is to write letters to his personal friends and to wealthy patrons of the college explaining that their sons have been dropped on account of deficiency in scholarship. It is not a pleasant job and the performance of it goes far to justify the somewhat larger salary which the president receives. Indeed, quite antithetically to the situation in the college described last May, it is the president who has to take most of the "knocks" arising from the actions of the governing body of the college, the faculty, whether or not he happens to be personally in sympathy with all that is done. Again and again has he found himself obliged to defend acts and policies with which he was by no means in accord.