454 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



of our thirty-one small colleges only nine have chosen laymen to the 

 presidency. 



Most of these colleges are, of course, still under denominational con- 

 trol, and while such is not the case with our college, tradition demands 

 that a clergyman fill the presidential chair. This tradition is doubtless 

 a survival from the days when ours also was a strictly denominational 

 college. We still have a large clientele in the state who cherish the fear 

 that the choosing of a layman for the presidency would be the last step 

 in the secularization, and therefore the demoralization of the college, 

 that it would thenceforth lose its character as a Christian college and 

 would become " Godless " in its tendencies. Just how sectarianism 

 contributes to the development of Christian character is not explained, 

 nor is it made satisfactorily clear in what way a wise and well-trained 

 teacher would fall short as an executive. Sooner or later this ministerial 

 tradition must be dispensed with, for we must eventually realize that 

 the only truly competent executive is the one who has "been through 

 the mill" and has risen to the presidency from the ranks of college 

 teachers ; nor will the character of the college as a Christian institution 

 suffer in the least by the appointment of such a man. Bather is it likely 

 that our Christianity may take on a somewhat deeper tone, and find its 

 vent in somewhat more practical manifestations. There may come to be 

 less preaching and more performance, less self-conscious talk about the 

 state of one's soul, and at the same time less cheating in examinations ; 

 for present experience indicates that religion of the current type and 

 dishonesty of a conventional sort are not at all incompatible. Our in- 

 herited brand of Christianity is sincere but narrow, issuing at best in a 

 personal righteousness that fails to take account of the broader social 

 responsibilities confronting the present age. It is to be hoped that our 

 college will ere long cast aside its theological leading strings and grow 

 into something broader and better than its present pseudo-sectarianism. 



Undoubtedly one of the worst effects of our president's failure to 

 recognize scholarship as our goal is its demoralizing effect on members 

 of the faculty. Left to themselves, there is no doubt that our teachers 

 would pursue scholarship as the end and aim of their professional ef- 

 forts. But as things stand at present, those who engage in this lofty 

 pursuit are neither encouraged nor appreciated. Our president wants 

 "rustlers" — men who are ready at a day's notice to leave their classes 

 and go out on a financial campaign or a student canvass, men who are 

 continually in the lime-light, attending committee meetings, speaking 

 to student gatherings, devising changes in the man-millinery which is 

 the outward and visible sign of our high calling, addressing question- 

 naires to the rest of the faculty on all sorts of unimportant topics, tack- 

 ing up notices in the halls, rushing officiously from place to place, and 

 making themselves generally as conspicuous as possible. Our president 

 is a fanatic on the subject of "efficiency," by which term he means 



