Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/548

544 teachers' agencies, school boards, and alumni, answer questions, make reports, and perhaps inspect schools. He must attend various association meetings, local and national, whose work is an integral part of his profession. He has social duties which are in reality professional—departmental dinners, the entertainment of visiting scholars and lecturers.

Last of all, he must prepare for the six hours, for which he is there first of all. If the general public would examine only a little more closely, it would perhaps find that all the six hours consisted of lectures, or the conduct of graduate work, and that they required a great deal of writing and an incredible amount of reading. A lecture in the history of the fine arts may involve the reading of two or three recent books. A lecture in science may entail a week's work in the preparation of experimental apparatus. One sitting of the seminar may require the examination of half a dozen technical articles. This kind of work is different from the mere teaching of how to construe a sentence, how to solve a problem in algebra, or how to perform a chemical analysis. The greatest and most depressing burden of the professor with few hours of instruction is the obligation to keep abreast of his subject—an obligation which it is impossible for even the minutest specialist in the longest established subject fully to meet.

If the general public will use pencil and paper after all the facts are in, it will find that, instead of six hours in the week for nine months in the year, the college professor is spending on the average eight hours a day for six days in the week through the whole of the year, and that, instead of $13.888888. . . an hour, he receives $1.201923072692. ..

This is for expert service in a profession requiring unusually protracted preparation, and involving social relations with the best paid classes of the community. If the college professor were a mere scientific manager of time and money, he would be insane to continue in a profession which never makes him rich, which brings him on the average only a living, and which is frequently a luxury made possible only by independent means. And yet there are those who think that the professor himself should be scientifically managed. What does keep him at work and give him value at all is something incalculable—an internal, driving, not an external, compelling force; and neither scientific management nor trades-unionism has yet learned to deal with internal, driving forces.

There is a third aspect of the liberal arts professor's function which is still more imperfectly appreciated by the ordinary public.

The college professor is an expert. Like all other experts, he is the means of contact between the mind of the public and the mind of learning. These two minds are unable to communicate with any degree of ease; the world, with all the business it has to do, can not hope to find