CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY 265 



There can be no question that American universities and' colleges 

 are highly centralized in respect to their organization and control. 

 The power legally is in the hands of some kind of a board of education, 

 mostly composed of business and professional men who are in no sense 

 organically a part of the institutional life of the university. Practi- 

 cally, the power centers in a president and faculty. In all matters that 

 refer to the running of the institutional life of the place, these are 

 autonomous bodies. They make their own laws; set their own stand- 

 ards; inflict their own penalties, and exercise their influence without 

 asking anybody any questions. Their constituency, so to speak in state 

 and church has little power. President and faculty are considerate of 

 their constituents — sometimes tenderly so, when the budget is in excess 

 of the available means, or when the normal percentage of increase of 

 attendance is not attained. Otherwise these good people are expected 

 to be silent well-wishers. Perhaps that is as it should be ; at least I see 

 no way to change it. Our chief consideration at this time, however, is 

 that students have almost no voice in the control of the institution 

 they attend, little feeling of responsibility for its destiny, almost no 

 sense that their personalities are caught up into it, or that they are 

 an organic part of its best life. The ordinary student feels himself to 

 be an attache, a recipient, an appendage at best, and lucky for him if 

 he is not a sort of parasite — a foreign body, drawing vitality from the 

 institution for a time and then going away with it. If I am right in 

 believing that the ordinary student has a sense that he is a sort of in- 

 mate of the institution, who must obey the rules and get what he can; 

 who does not have a stimulating sense of partnership in the place ; who 

 can talk with zest about my fraternity or our team, but who never can 

 talk with the same warmth about our college spirit, or our curriculum, 

 or our faculty, or our institution; if the bulk of students at the end 

 of the four years' course have any feeling deep down that the center 

 and core of their own wills are aloof from the deepest, warmest currents 

 of the institutional life, then something is wrong; for the university 

 exists solely for the student — indeed, it has no other reason for being. 

 I fear, however, that our universities have become bulky institutions 

 that exist chiefly for themselves — to perfect their own machinery, to 

 preserve their own lives; they are closed systems busy with inner ad- 

 justments, rather than with the problem of how they can cultivate the 

 soul-life of those entrusted to their care, and burning with a passion to 

 be of service, through the students, to church, state and humanity. 

 Our higher institutions have been developing, during recent decades, 

 rapidly in the direction of an imperialistic attitude toward students. 

 Professor Stratton, who first set our minds going in a lively manner 

 in this direction, points out the anomaly existing in our political ideals 

 and our university practises, and also the anomaly of anomalies that 



