98 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



plans to the university as to its opportunities in relation to the state. 



Doubtless there are other lines also in which volunteer committees of 

 interested men and women could be of equal service to the university, 

 to the student body, and to the state at large, but these are enough to 

 illustrate the possibility involved. 



The one point which needs to be made clear is this, that every mem- 

 ber of the university faculty ought to have a chance to share in some 

 real way in the determination of the policies of the university, and in 

 shaping its integral social destiny. Otherwise, such members will 

 either dry up into mere scholastic bean-pods in which their knowledge 

 will rattle around, or else they will become disgusted with the bare for- 

 malities of the university and resign to go into work that offers larger 

 opportunities for the use of real intelligence. 



Complaint is often heard that faculty meetings are lifeless and dry. 

 The reason is that the committee work of the average faculty is monop- 

 olized by a few members who take the attitude of dictators of policies, 

 which the many are expected to follow; these being asked, at stated 

 intervals, to come in from their scholastic duties to vote to confirm the 

 determination of the makers of the policies. The arguments of com- 

 mittee members are usually dogmatic and dictatorial under this system, 

 and the question of the non-committee members are usually scholastic 

 and formal, for they have usually no interest in and little knowledge 

 of the subject. 



Now no man can be a real teacher in his class room, in the larger 

 social sense demanded by our modern world, who has not had some 

 share in determining the actual conditions and policies under which 

 that class-room work is conducted. Every man worthy of being a 

 teacher is worthy of having some part in determining the conditions 

 under which he teaches. Every man worthy of having a position in a 

 university at all has some intelligence with reference to the organiza- 

 tion and the educational policy of such an institution. In so far as he 

 has such intelligence the state is being defrauded if that intelligence is 

 not called into use in helping to determine policies. Aristocratic con- 

 ceptions of authority should not blind us to these facts. 



Certainly there is nothing more anomalous in all our modern world 

 than an undemocratic character in the very institutions which we boast 

 of as being the training schools of democracy. How such undemocratic 

 institutions fail to train for real democratic living is being shown in 

 the fact of the all but complete failure of the school in relation to demo- 

 cratic living. Certainly the schools, and especially the university, 

 ought to be able to work out processes of real democratic administra- 

 tion within themselves as the chief centers of democratic progress. 



Such a plan, as proposed above, with all the corollaries implied but 

 not expressed, is very possible of execution. Not only is it possible, but 



