Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/191

Rh an appointment is to be made, confers freely and with entire candor with the professors whose work is most like that which is to be done by the new incumbent, and some decision is generally arrived at by a sort of mutual understanding arising without formal rules. Nevertheless it has happened again and again that appointments must be made under conditions absolutely precluding any considerable conference with members of the faculty. It is probably true that professors have means of finding out things about candidates from other institutions which lie beyond the range of the president's powers of investigation; but there is one difficulty about the circumstances brought to light by professors investigating each other. A good deal of the information thus collected is not true. It is based upon personal jealousies, pique, personal likes and dislikes—all of which give a certain pleasant tang to life in the college faculty but which are very misleading when allowed to count for much in judging the man who is leaving one faculty for another.

We are hearing a good deal just now of that freedom of thought and of the expression of it which ought to be enjoyed by college professors. Evidently college professors must be allowed to think without restraint within very broad limits. The expression of their thoughts should not be criticized or at least should not be used as a reason for dismissal from college because some trustee happens to disagree with them. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that even college professors sometimes talk very foolishly, and if a professor or a president makes himself and the institution which he represents ridiculous there would seem no very great injustice in suppressing him. Isn't it a possibility that college men are all too thin-skinned, too sensitive, too jealous of each other, too considerate of the persons whom they think themselves to be.

Various recent developments seem to indicate a regrettable tendency on the part of college professors toward something like class feeling; toward the notion that they are somehow different from other people. It will be a great misfortune if this idea is allowed to prevail, if it is allowed to become permanent. When we forget that everybody is pretty much like everybody else, when any persons employed in a particular fashion get to think that they are otherwise than just folks, there is trouble brewing. This president feels pretty sure that the average college professor is too sensible to allow himself to be betrayed for long into such an untenable position.

Within the last ten years there have been in this small college of ours thirty-seven men who have held permanent appointments as well as a good many who have taken a small amount of work in emergencies or who have been here temporarily while professors have been away on leave of absence. Of these thirty-seven twenty are now in the faculty. Of the seventeen who have left three were dismissed either for