456 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



grew up a form of college organization, adequate enough for its day, 

 but fraught with potentialities of serious danger for the future. The 

 president, in that early time, although usually a clergyman, was a teacher 

 also, and met classes like the rest of the faculty. His was not then a 

 position of great power. He was primus inter pares — the senior mem- 

 ber of the faculty and the presiding officer in its meetings — not the 

 Czar that he has since become. The American college was poor in those 

 days, and its scanty funds were held in trust by a body of men who, 

 that they might be impersonal and disinterested, were chosen from out- 

 side the college. As the college grew in wealth this group of trustees 

 grew in importance, and gradually assumed not simply the investment 

 of college funds, but the actual management of the college itself. Need- 

 ing a representative within the college, they naturally chose the presi- 

 dent, conferring on him autocratic authority, and correspondingly cur- 

 tailing the power of the faculty. Thus grew up, gradually, a makeshift 

 system of college government that could hardly be worse. The wonder 

 is not that it works so poorly ; the wonder is that it works at all ; yet for 

 many generations this system has been reduplicated all over the United 

 States with scarcely a thought of the possibility of an improvement. 

 Our college is merely one of the many that have copied this viciously 

 undemocratic model, incorporating its worst features into their charters. 



Trustees, president and faculty alike suffer from this bad condition 

 of things. The faculty, being debarred from the exercise of their nat- 

 ural functions, become firebrands of discontent, or relapse in fatalistic 

 apathy, or become parasitic sycophants fawning on president and trus- 

 tees for such crumbs of favor as may now and then be thrown in their 

 direction. In general they feel keenly that something is amiss, but fail 

 to analyze the situation and locate the trouble. Yet the situation is not 

 difficult of analysis. The key to it lies in the fact that the college is 

 governed by men who lack the technical experience necessary to govern 

 it well, and the faculty, who possess this technical experience, are barred 

 from any effective share in its management. 



The president makes a sincere effort to make a fair and equitable 

 adjustment of the budget to the needs of the departments, but he fails, 

 and that for a number of reasons. In the first place, he lacks the tech- 

 nical knowledge necessary to an understanding of the needs of the de- 

 partments. In the second place, he is under the influence of the trus- 

 tees with their passion for expansion and inflation; and he is contin- 

 ually trying to make a big showing by putting the funds that should 

 go to the strengthening of existing departments into the creation of 

 new ones, or into advertising. Thus the older departments are de- 

 prived of needed equipment (the students of course being the ultimate 

 sufferers) and salaries are kept below -the efficiency level. In the third 

 place he fails because he enjoys too large a measure of irresponsible 

 power. It is the fashion nowadays to compare the college to an indus- 



