502 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



naive good faith, to a mechanism which they utterly fail to under- 

 stand, the rules for efficiency in a bank or a department-store " (W. C. 

 Lawton). They seem to be as unfortunate in delegating as in exer- 

 cising their powers. " The present autocratic position of university 

 executives was created for them by the acts of trustees in shifting re- 

 sponsibility for the performance of certain duties from their own shoul- 

 ders to that of the president and deans" (Stewart Paton). The 

 " quickest and least troublesome way to solve administrative problems 

 is to give as free a hand as possible " to some capable man (J. P. Mun- 

 roe). The ready vindication of such authority lies in that much-abused 

 term, " efficiency." " When the wisdom of letting a man lord it over 

 an aggregate of employees instead of conferring with a company of 

 scholars is questioned, the answer is the efficiency with which the auto- 

 crat can get things done " (J. McK. Cattell). Efficiency undefined and 

 unattached is either the most meaningless 2 or the most dangerous of 

 terms; there are efficient fools and knaves and meddlers and weather- 

 vanes and apologists and dissemblers, and most hopelessly the class 

 whose costly efficiency is an eruption of their callous insensibility. 

 Even so directly a utilitarian thing as a signpost is efficient only when 

 you know where you want to go and where not; the term should never 

 be permitted to appear in educational discussions without a chaperone. 



The relation of professor to president can not be dismissed at 

 this point. On the one side is the irritating accountability or sub- 

 serviency or worse. " To hold a Damascus blade over other men's lives, 

 careers, reputations, may still be the fashion in Damascus. The Anglo- 

 Saxon has had the right for uncounted centuries to a full hearing and 

 decision by an open council of his peers" (W. C. Lawton). Given the 

 right type of man, and it may be easy to avoid overbearing in manner 

 or spirit ; yet it seems fated to persist in the formal relations of the pro- 

 fessor to the administration from which (for one thing) the professor is 

 estranged by a foolish etiquette requiring him, lest he offend by Use 



2 It is worth foot-noting that the Carnegie Foundation which is ostensibly 

 devoted ' ' to the Advancement of Teaching ' ' (yet is governed by a board of 

 college presidents with no representative of the teaching profession) sponsored 

 a report on efficiency in academic affairs, which brought forth the following 

 comment from a journal technically expert to judge the article: "Its whole tenor 

 was to lay emphasis upon the destruction of the academic freedom and initiative 

 that is necessary to the advancement of human intelligence, and to promote that 

 kind of organization which under the guise of uniformity and system effectively 

 suppresses progress" (Electrical World and Engineer). And this from a 

 worldly source : ' ' What efficiency experts sometimes forget is that there is a type 

 of ability that can be found and retained better by the offer of a secure and 

 dignified post than by the flourishing of money" (Springfield Bepublican: 

 Editorial). An efficiency primer might well set forth as its first axiom, that it 

 consists in adapting means to ends; its second, that different ends require differ- 

 ent means; its third that expertness in means grows out of loyalty to ends. 

 Beyond this, matters are too complex for those who use primers — even for the 

 intelligent and benevolent laity of mature years. 



