268 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Members of faculties are also human. They have acquired all the 

 power that has been relegated to them by constituencies and boards of 

 education, and have picked up whatever else they could acquire on 

 their own account. They have sometimes watched their chances 

 to share the responsibilities of the institution with the president, 

 lest it should weigh too heavily upon him. Some one has happily 

 said that no Irishman could be found in Ireland so poor but that he 

 has not some other Irishman dependent upon him. Presidents and 

 faculties together have come into the position of almost entire separa- 

 tion from the student body. They have the attitude of ruler and ruled. 

 They march in stately parades, begowned in robes of dignity and state 

 before the admiring eyes of the students; they run the institution; 

 they dispense grades and degrees as parsimoniously as possible to stu- 

 dents who devote their college career to earning these marks and badges 

 as economically as possible. 



4. In the fourth place, competition has played its part in bringing 

 about centralized authority. It has been necessary for institutions to 

 act and act quickly in the raising of funds, in the employment of in- 

 structors and in appeals to the public. The matter of winning out in 

 the contest has led us to do much as a hive of bees in creating a queen. 

 We have done everything in our power to produce presidents who are 

 masterful, who can appear well, who can be " drawing cards " in tempt- 

 ing into our institutions the guileless youth of the land. There is no 

 one who will dispute that our university and college presidents are of 

 the noblest of our people. But we are creating them at too high a cost. 

 It is the fundamental axiom of our entire educational system that the 

 end is not so much to produce leaders as to lift the level of all. It is 

 growing too late in the history of democracy in the world to need to 

 argue the point. Still an analogy will be in place. Christianity, dur- 

 ing the first century, was a spiritual brotherhood. In the second and 

 third centuries, they began to have conventions, and it was the custom 

 for a bishop and at least one layman to represent a church or diocese. 

 By the fourth century, the laymen had been almost forgotten in their 

 councils ; and from that time on the power became more and more cen- 

 tralized in the hands of a few of the highest officials of the church. The 

 consequence is a familiar fact of history. From the fifth century, for 

 several centuries following, the organization of Christendom was a 

 closed system with neither change nor progress. It existed not for 

 mankind as persons, but for itself and its own institutional ideals. 

 In our educational system the laity, the students in our universities, 

 have long since lost their voice. Our educational elders, let us say, 

 that is, members of faculties, have been little consulted in our national 

 association of universities that are taking upon themselves the right to 

 determine the educational policies of the country. We are living in a 



