TEE SMALL COLLEGE 449 



THE SMALL COLLEGE AND ITS PRESIDENT 



By ONE OP ITS PROFESSORS 



THE institution which must here be described merely as "our col- 

 lege " is one of a large class, of which it may be taken as a typical 

 specimen. It is located in a thriving middle-western town of a little 

 over thirty thousand population. It has a faculty of twenty, a student 

 body numbering a little less than five hundred, a campus of ten acres in 

 the heart of the town, seven good buildings, three of which have been 

 built within the past ten years, endowed funds of over half a million 

 dollars, and library and laboratory equipment fairly adequate to present 

 needs. It enjoys what its trustees and some of its faculty regard as 

 the high distinction of a place on the accepted list of the Carnegie Foun- 

 dation. While in scholarship standards it may rank below some of the 

 smaller colleges of our state, it is superior to others, and certainly does 

 not fall below the average. There is of course the inevitable weak 

 department, filled by an incumbent whose innocuous " Christian char- 

 acter" is his only recommendation. On the other hand, there are 

 strong departments whose work commands outside recognition in the 

 world of scholars, and whose class-room standards provoke wholesome 

 respect on the part of students. Striking an average, it may be said 

 without exaggeration that, measured by the ideals of its teachers, the 

 college stands for a high grade of scholarship, while measured by the 

 results achieved its standard is barely respectable. In fact, there is far 

 too wide a gap between ideals and achievement, between profession and 

 performance, and it shall be in part the purpose of the present article to 

 trace some of the causes of this unfortunate discrepancy. 



Many more or less obvious reasons suggest themselves. Insufficient 

 equipment is frequently assigned as the cause of our shortcoming; yet 

 this is a most inadequate excuse. While not all that it ought to be, the 

 equipment of the college is not bad. Great scholars, both in the hu- 

 manities and the sciences, have been trained on poorer material equip- 

 ment than ours. Inbreeding may be suggested by the outsider who 

 reads our catalogue and observes that seven teachers out of twenty were 

 trained at the home college. This suggestion is not without weight, for 

 in colleges as in human families inbreeding tends to accentuate the 

 defects, yet a good majority of the faculty were trained in eastern uni- 

 versities, and the third who took their bachelor's degree here have had 

 their courses at higher institutions, with a chance to absorb university 

 methods and ideals. While inbreeding has been anything but a benefit 

 to the college, it would be grossly unfair to hold it responsible for all our 

 shortcomings. 



VOL. LXXXIV. — 31. 



