Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/553

Rh fallibility of human effort. The habit of looking for permanent values is inbred in him, of disregarding the external and the temporary. To him, "the eternal verities" is no idle phrase. He has a natural distrust of new and over-facile schemes. He is given to contemplation rather than action. He is a brake, a balance wheel, a governor, a partial correction to the shouting optimism of enthusiastic ignorance.

He is a force for idealism. He is exceptionally free from contact with the sordidness of life. His converse in letters, art and history is with the beautiful and the noble in human thought and conduct. His duty involves the constant effort to reintroduce into human life the emotional experience of the past. Imagine the idealism of the liberal arts entirely removed from higher education; you will see life appreciably harder and more sordid.

The duty of the liberal arts professor is thus best described as a duty of Being. He must Be master of his subject. He must Be familiar with the general field of knowledge. He must Be intelligent in his thinking and in his feeling—which means that he must Be cultivated. He must Be inspired. He must Be an irradiator of inspiration. He must Be pure in his living.

All he has to Do, according to the standards of worldly business, is to instruct young men and women at certain hours of the day. According to worldly business, too, he should be scientifically managed. He should be made to Do as much as other men, and the effects of his Doing should be concrete and measurable.

But whatever this Doing accomplishes must be conditioned upon the thoroughness of the Being, and Being is not susceptible of measurement. In the same way, the most important result of his instruction, and its greatest value to the student and the state, lies in the Being which is the source of all best Doing in the individual citizen; land this, too, is not susceptible of measurement.

Scientific management applied to the liberal arts—or to any other teaching—is the most unintelligent of self-contradictions. To insist on the college professor's Doing more is to compel his Being less. If society does not want him and his influence, let it abolish his office. If it does want him, it should remember that the application to him and his work of rules from the industrial world would be equivalent to abolition.

The professor who is a failure is taken care of. He is discovered and put in his place—not by regents or trustees, and least of all by a professional investigator, but by his fellows. He is not the real thing. In the case of the professor who is the real thing, the more the talk of Efficiency, the less the Service.