266 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Germany reverses the inconsistency, being politically imperialistic, but 

 educationally democratic. Speaking of our own nation he says: 



Among a people so jealous of private rights, university governments have 

 assumed a form that we might have expected to see in a land of kings. Euro- 

 pean universities have a constitution that might have come from some American 

 theorist. American universities are as though founded and fostered in the 

 bourne of aristocracy. Europe and America are each harboring what would 

 seem properly sacred only to the other. 



There are four or five causes that have brought about too great a 

 centralization of authority in the hands of president and faculty, and 

 along with it a cleavage of interest of faculty and student body until 

 they stand off from one another in a relationship that is not wholesome 

 for either. 



1. In the first place, a historic strain of autocracy has come down 

 from the old-fashioned schoolmaster. In the early days of America, 

 the schoolmaster, with rod and rule if need be, usually a man — not a 

 lad of eighteen or a woman or much less a frail girl — was a monarch 

 in his realm. He was built, and for a reason, on the lines of a sturdy, 

 stern Anglo-Saxon father. He has left us as a heritage his custom and 

 conception of imperialistic authority in education along with his in- 

 effaceable three " r's." The secondary schools were differentiated from 

 the common schools. The " head master " developed out of the parent 

 stem, the schoolmaster, under the rule that like produces like. He 

 was well named, for he was expected to be superior in wisdom and 

 masterful in bearing. The college is a specialization of the old acad- 

 emy and high school, and has inherited from these many of its ideas 

 about curriculum, form of organization and centralized authority. 



2. In the second place, as Professor Stratton has pointed out, our 

 higher institutions have received a strain from the form of government 

 of the early colonies. These were under the rule of the mother country, 

 which rule was effected through a corporation, or a governor, or both. 

 They were never elected by the colonists nor selected from among their 

 number, but superimposed on them from the mother country. Our 

 boards of education are descendants of the early corporations, and the 

 university presidents are built after the pattern of the early governors. 



In imperialistic Europe the democratic life of the faculty and the 

 university generally, on the contrary, is the direct historical conse- 

 quent of the old guilds that were established around the idea of equal- 

 ity, fraternity and mutual helpfulness. 



3. In the third place, the higher institutions have reaped the bless- 

 ings and also the ills of the naive democracy in which each individual 

 is turned loose to do as he pleases, and, being human, chooses to be un- 

 duly self regardful. There are many indications that the earlier col- 

 leges, established by people whose passion was for equal opportunity, 



