514 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



responsive to the higher standards, should become sensitive to the 

 autocracy in educational administration and look upon it with distrust. 

 They understand, if they do not embrace, the cause of academic insur- 

 gency. They may be few in number, even exceptional; they are grow- 

 ing in influence. But the professor must not look passively for relief 

 from without ; he must find it within his guild. The clouds of promise 

 though small are visible above the horizon. Protests are growing and 

 are no longer received as dangerous or pardonable idiosyncrasies. The 

 class of men from which presidents are recruited shows a considerable 

 group alert to the evils of the system which they are called upon to ad- 

 minister. Programs of reform have been proposed : advisory bodies 

 to offset presidential autocracy and make the position representative; 

 the election of the president by the faculty together with the deter- 

 mination by the faculty of the powers which he is to exercise ; the abol- 

 ition of the office altogether. Speaking some years ago in a conciliatory 

 mood, I favored the gradual elimination by reformatory measures of 

 the most serious administrative evils, and trusted to the spirit thus 

 awakened to carry the movement to a fitting consummation. I confess 

 that the logic of the abolitionist position is growing upon me. It seems 

 in so many ways disturbing to have a commanding figure in the aca- 

 demic horizon; the foolish and increasing pomp and circumstance of 

 each presidential inaugural deepens the impression. Yet I still believe 

 that the presidential office, shorn of its unwise and unsafe authority, of 

 its aloofness in salary and lime-light conspicuousness, of the preroga- 

 tives which it has assumed because unclaimed (or, in the vernacular, 

 because not securely nailed down), could be adjusted to accomplish 

 all the essential desiderata. I believe this mainly because I believe 

 that the position thus reconstructed would attract a different type 

 of man — one who would desire to be no more and no less than an aca- 

 demic leader serving by the warrant of election and of constitutional 

 support by the body which he serves. Clashes of policy must be avoided 

 by the fusion of interests, not by the imposition of an external authority. 

 The rectification of the greatest loss constitutes the restoration of 

 the greatest gain. The independence of the academic career as em- 

 bodied in the status of the professor remains the noeud vital of the edu- 

 cational system. Untoward conditions affect the intellectual economy 

 unfavorably from its lowest to its highest ramifications. The blight of 

 the blossoms is often caused by the impoverished soil at the roots. It 

 is at the upper levels of fruition where growth is most sensitive to cli- 

 matic influences that the hazard is greatest. In acknowledging the 

 honorary degree which Harvard University conferred upon William 

 James to make him yet more distinctively her own, he offered in return 

 the concentrated expression of his academic experience. "The univer- 

 sity most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely 

 thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered, and 



