UNIVERSITY CONTROL 389 



As Dr. Draper is not speaking of the small college with one hundred 

 students, no one will be disposed to dispute his assertion that the 

 position calls for a rare man. It may be added that a board of trus- 

 tees competent to make intelligent choice of this rare man would be 

 composed of still rarer men. If they should be fortunate enough to 

 find him they could not keep him, for such ability is in demand, and 

 some life insurance company would soon offer him several times the 

 salary for a small fraction of the work. Undoubtedly Dr. Draper 

 has summarized the requirements as they are idealized in some minds 

 and no doubt there are men who feel assured that he has described the 

 work they actually do, the whole work of the trustees as well as the 

 whole internal work of the institution aside from teaching. Beyond 

 all question, there are those who attempt this. But appointments are 

 not made on the basis of this rare, broad qualification. The only ques- 

 tion is as to the candidate's ability to meet the requirement which the 

 board thinks most urgent — usually one which in the list seems to be 

 of rather secondary importance. And one may not censure the board 

 for this. As the number of colleges is far beyond the country's needs, 

 financial stringency is ordinarily the only requirement with which the 

 trustee is familiar. The selection, as a rule, is not made because the 

 candidate is qualified to control an educational institution, but rather 

 without any reference to that matter. As a rule the appointee is not 

 a teacher. He is apt to entertain great respect for education and none 

 too much for educating or educators. 



The newly-appointed president may or may not have an ideal — that 

 is unimportant. He finds quickly, except in some of the older universi- 

 ties, that the board of trustees has an ideal; that board expects a com- 

 mercial success, more money, more students. The president's path is 

 marked out for him ; he is not to be successor to Hopkins, Witherspoon 

 or Day; he is to be a wandering mendicant, exposed to rebuffs and 

 disappointments of the most galling type ; he is to feel that prospective 

 heirs look on him as attempting to rob the widow and orphan. How- 

 ever sharply one may assert that the president's office, as it now exists, 

 is an injury to higher education, he must recognize the heroic sense 

 of duty which prevents so many presidents from abandoning their posts. 



The most serious matter in this connection is the complete alienation 

 of the president from the work of teaching. In the smaller institutions, 

 where he is still professor of some branch of philosophy, his work as 

 teacher is wholly subordinate to that as traveling collector of funds. 

 In the larger universities, teaching is impossible, and the president is 

 simply managing officer of a great corporation, with buttons on his desk 

 which keep him in touch with managers of departments. His work is 

 purely administrative, and in the very nature of the case he comes to 

 regard all within the corporation's range as his subordinates. If he 



