396 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



UNIVERSITY CONTROL. 



By Professor J. J. STEVENSON, 



NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. 



r I THE pessimism with which some recent writers regard the university 

 -*- outlook in our country is, unfortunately, not wholly unreasonable. 

 Yet the conditions, far though they be from the ideal, are not such as 

 to make one despondent. The rapid development of our country 

 has brought difficulties to colleges and universities as it did to business 

 enterprises. The business world recognized the difficulties and over- 

 came them at the cost of complete change in methods. Let the business 

 common sense, which has made the United States preeminent in com- 

 merce, be applied to university matters and it will give us equal pre- 

 eminence in education. It is necessary to recognize the conditions 

 frankly, to cast aside injurious makeshifts and to adjust the methods 

 to the new surroundings and the new demands. For the surroundings 

 and the demands are new. Within the last thirty years, the relations 

 between the teaching and the corporate boards have undergone a serious 

 transformation; the relations of college professors to the community, 

 as well as to their students, have been revolutionized; the manner and 

 the matter of the professor's work in many departments bear no resem- 

 blance to those of thirty years ago. The extent and nature of these 

 changes are known in but slight degree to those in the corporate boards 

 of colleges and universities ; the community is wholly ignorant of them. 

 Let us understand them. 



At the close of the Civil War, American colleges were comparatively 

 small. Their trustees, for the most part, were alumni or professional 

 men familiar with college work, as it then existed, and personally 

 acquainted with the professors with whom they were in sympathy and 

 for whose benefit they held their place. But, within a generation, the 

 small colleges have become large, many of them have expanded into true 

 universities with numerous departments, hundreds of instructors and 

 thousands of students; while the financial interests, expanding more 

 rapidly than the institutions, have attained a magnitude in some cases 

 as great as that of New York's finances fifty years ago. No trustee 

 in a large college to-day can know much of college work as such, can 

 be acquainted with the faculties, can do much more than bear his share 

 of the business responsibility. Vast sums of money needed for expan- 

 sion, even for continued existence, are sought from men, who, having 



