THE ADMINISTRATIVE PERIL IN EDUCATION 497 



ministration: in policy, in measures, in personal relations, in all the 

 distinctive interests of education, and the welfare of ideas and ideals. 

 What is imperiled most directly is the academic career: its worth, its 

 service, its security, its satisfactions, its attractiveness to the higher 

 types of men. 



The professorial career is in its requirements distinctive, though not 

 unique; it is by nature institutionalized. The professor can not very 

 well be unattached or very much of a free lance; yet his creative ener- 

 gies demand a sympathetic, unhampered environment. He can not sell 

 his birthright and remain a freeman; the institution can not place a 

 mortgage upon his output without injury to its value. The university 

 can best provide the collective facilities, the communal stimulus, the 

 larger environment, in which intellectual products flourish. Institu- 

 tionalism carries a menace to personality, at the worst reducing those 

 enlisted in its service to a set of cogs in a wheel ; yet the intimate asso- 

 ciation with a corporate body offers a worthy communion if worthily 

 administered by those free to follow the wisdom that in them lies. 

 The corporate university can be no more and should be no less than the 

 reflex of its spirit; to express the quality we borrow the term esprit de 

 corps — the indigenous sentiment holding that corporations have no 

 souls. Under present conditions it is a needlessly difficult task to make 

 the inevitable institutional quality of the professorial service a source of 

 strength; to reduce its disabilities is the first step. American profes- 

 sors are not disposed to call one another " Herr College " ; what he pro- 

 fesses shapes the manner of the man above the bare fact of his profes- 

 sion ; and thus the professor loses the solidarity of interest more readily 

 attained in other callings. His professional sense needs stimulation. 

 The requisites of a true profession are that its members shall author- 

 itatively represent, advance and control its interests, as well as the 

 qualifications for membership; each member thereof shall be subject 

 definitively to the judgment of his peers. The profession forms a 

 peerage in the best sense. Thus weighed, the professoriate is found 

 sadly wanting; and until this privilege is restored or acquired for the 

 American professor, the career must continue to suffer a serious, almost 

 a fatal handicap. Present tendencies are aggravating this unfortu- 

 nate influence; the current is set strongly in the opposite direction; 



Education, 1912") as a potent factor in the comprehensively unsatisfactory 

 character of our educational system, methods and product. He regards the limi- 

 tation of the authority of school boards and the establishment of school faculties 

 with authority over educational matters as essential steps to permanent improve- 

 ment. The present system wastes the intellectual force and enthusiasm of good 

 teachers ; it deadens initiative and cultivates prudent acquiescence. In its place a 

 true professionalism would advance the status of teaching and teachers more 

 effectively than any other single measure, and would bring with it the benefits 

 now sought for in vain by petition and complaint. 



vol. Lxxxi.— 34. 



