4 io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



of 63. The writer has gathered numerous catalogues and appeals 

 during the last two years and he can present other illustrations of the 

 same type. Whether or not a state should permit multiplication of 

 such colleges may not seem to many to be an open question. 



The real colleges and universities should come to an honest recog- 

 nition of the fact that they were founded to produce mental, not phys- 

 ical athletes ; college authorities and they alone are responsible for the 

 common belief that, in college, intellectual work is less important 

 than physical. " Methods of the shop " are denounced by many col- 

 lege presidents and by many professors as degrading; but nowhere are 

 those methods more conspicuous than in colleges themselves. The only 

 evidence of success, apparently, is increased enrollment, more funds, 

 more houses, more low-priced teachers. Quantity, not quality. Col- 

 lege presidents and professional canvassers hawk their wares as blatantly 

 as criers at a fair; advertisements are placed in journals and circulars 

 are sent broadcast, extolling the advantages of the institution as 

 shrewdly as though the wares were oriental rugs; students entrusted 

 to college authorities for mental training are utilized for advertising 

 purposes and the college controls the process. Many colleges have a 

 special exhibition day, when prospective students are invited to inspect 

 the concern. Students, once gained, have an inordinate sense of their 

 importance and resent regulation by the faculty as interference with 

 their rights. Strikes among college boys are becoming only too fa- 

 miliar and the plague has found its way into high, even into grammar 

 schools. Discipline is weakened and young Americans at college are 

 growing up in a school of disobedience and evasion. 



College trustees must change their methods; they must acquire a 

 new conception of duty and must remember that they are custodians of 

 a great trust for whose honest management they are responsible. The 

 fact that under present conditions there is none to call them to account 

 should make their sense of personal honor more acute. A trustee 

 should endeavor to familiarize himself with the kind and extent of 

 work done by professors, and should not consent to accept only such 

 information as the president may think proper to present. It is little 

 short of scandalous that great universities with thousands of students 

 and vast properties should be controlled by men who are utterly 

 ignorant of the work which is done or which might to lie done. There 

 is no hope for American colleges, unless their affairs can be placed in 

 charge of sympathetic trustees, who will recognize their personal lim- 

 itations and will concede gladly that not they, hut the faculties are the 

 university. Great railroad companies have been wrecked because finan- 

 ciers on the board of directors insisted on managing the road according 

 to their notions through a financier president; other great companies 

 have been rescued from destruction by repentant boards, who confined 



