THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 557 



room, he howls and even cusses on the foot-ball field — and if he does 

 not do these things, you and your callow sons will rise up to boycott 

 him and dub him " uppish." 



But if professors are not overburdened with personal dignity, the 

 sense of dignity and the right to be respected and heard as a body in 

 the faculty is positively wanting. This is true not only in a few schools, 

 but, almost without exception, in all. The trouble, as indicated, lies 

 as much with the professors themselves as with others. Faculties have 

 failed to demand respect for their views and findings. The average 

 faculty does not respect its own decrees. As Americans, I assume, our 

 (respect for law may be taken to be nil, but the intelligence of the all- 

 wise faculty should dictate some respect at least for their own laws. 

 But they have none. Oh, there are a few schools which have codified 

 the rulings passed from time to time by the faculty, but in the great 

 majority of cases no one in the school knows anything about past legis- 

 lation. It might be found, possibly, by running through the faculty 

 minutes of the past years, but who would be so foolish as to do that 

 when it is so easy simply to " knock off " a new law whenever the need 

 arises, and thus make the law von Fall zu Fall, as Bismarck made 

 politics. 



What the college " senate," as we sometimes proudly call the faculty, 

 needs is a sense of dignity as a body, after the fashion of the original 

 " senate " which wrote its own name first in the proud phrase Senatus 

 Populusque Romanus. Far be it from the American college senate to 

 write its name ahead of anything ! This is the style it employs : The 

 Students, Administration, the Janitors and the Senate of So and So. 

 Most faculty men are too jealous of each other and of their " stand in " 

 with the administration ever to pull together in anything that makes 

 for strength in the faculty. Then there are, of course, the inverte- 

 brates and the weak whom ye have with ye alway; but that brings me 

 to another chapter. 



It is the chapter entitled: Scholarship not wanted in America! 

 There are various reasons for this ukase which has gone forth. First, 

 men of real scholarship might some time take it into their heads really 

 to make the sons of fond parents study. Such old-fashioned notions 

 would mean calamity — calamity to culture, because to get culture you 

 must do nothing for at least four years. As the average small college 

 has it : a four-years' loaf makes a well-bred man. Calamity to educa- 

 tion for citizenship, for education for citizenship, as the cry is now 

 penetrating to the small college, means, I fear: athletics, social inter- 

 course, random talks by lawyers, politicians ; a lot of frothy stuff about 

 the glory and responsibility of citizenship, without the first idea of 

 obedience to law and institutions, the very crown and cornerstone of 

 good citizenship, without that most essential asset in the citizen; the 

 power to do prolonged hard work. 



