544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



teachers' agencies, school boards, and alnmni, answer questions, make 

 reports, and perhaps inspect schools. He must attend various associa- 

 tion meetings, lodal and national, whose work is an integral part of his 

 profession. He has social duties which are in reality professional — 

 departmental dinners, the entertainment of visiting scholars and lec- 

 turers. 



Last of all, he must prepare for the six hours, for which he is there 

 first of all. If the general public would examine only a little more 

 closely, it would perhaps find that all the six hours consisted of lectures, 

 or the conduct of graduate work, and that they required a great deal of 

 writing and an incredible amount of reading. A lecture in the history of 

 the fine arts may involve the reading of two or three recent books. A 

 lecture in science may entail a week's work in the preparation of experi- 

 mental apparatus. One sitting of the seminar may require the exami- 

 nation of half a dozen technical articles. This kind of work is different 

 from the mere teaching of how to construe a sentence, how to solve a 

 problem in algebra, or how to perform a chemical analysis. The great- 

 est and most depressing burden of the professor with few hours of in- 

 struction is the obligation to keep abreast of his subject — an obligation 

 which it is impossible for even the minutest specialist in the longest 

 established subject fully to meet. 



If the general public will use pencil and paper after all the facts 

 are in, it will find that, instead of six hours in the week for nine months 

 in the year, the college professor is spending on the average eight hours 

 a day for six days in the week through the whole of the year, and that, 

 instead of $13.888888 ... an hour, he receives $1.201923072692 . . . 



This is for expert service in a profession requiring unusually pro- 

 tracted preparation, and involving social relations with the best paid 

 classes of the community. If the college professor were a mere scientific 

 manager of time and money, he would be insane to continue in a pro- 

 fession which never makes him rich, which brings him on the average 

 only a living, and which is frequently a luxury made possible only by 

 independent means. And yet there are those who think that the pro- 

 fessor himself should be scientifically managed. What does keep him 

 at work and give him value at all is something incalculable — an inter- 

 nal, driving, not an external, compelling force; and neither scientific 

 management nor trades-unionism has yet learned to deal with internal, 

 driving forces. 



Ill 



There is a third aspect of the liberal arts professor's function which 

 is still more imperfectly appreciated by the ordinary public. 



The college professor is an expert. Like all other experts, he is the 

 means of contact between the mind of the public and the mind of learn- 

 ing. These two minds are unable to communicate with any degi'ee of 

 ease ; the world, with all the business it has to do, can not hope to find 



