CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY 269 



later age, and must not allow the history of the first five centuries to 

 repeat itself. 



The spirit of competition has magnified out of all proportion the 

 value of quantity instead of quality. Bigness has bred looseness of 

 organization and aloofness of person from person and group from group. 

 The tendency toward manifoldness has been augmented by the natural 

 law of differentiation, of which specialization is an instance, until our 

 institutions are atomistic. Each person has relegated to everybody else 

 all responsibility for everything except his own little sphere of interests. 

 This differentiation amounts in the long run to radical individualism 

 and approximates indifferentism, the worst disease that can affect the 

 life of higher institutions. The only excuse for the large university is 

 that it may have a more highly organic and intense life than a smaller 

 one can have. Growth at the expense of inner coordination, refinement 

 of articulation and intensification of the individuality of the whole, is 

 a disease, whether in plant, animal or institution. We have grown 

 like a boy in his teens as fast as our health would allow. The rapid 

 differentiation in general has naturally widened the gap between stu- 

 dent and faculty, who are made for each other like eyes and hands. 

 The next step, in order to get safely through our stalking educational 

 adolescence, must be in the direction of binding up into the life of our 

 colleges again, the personal lives of students. 



5. Still another fact must be mentioned that has made of our facul- 

 ties against their own will, ruling or governing bodies who are set off 

 against a pack of persons supposing themselves to have antithetical 

 interests to those of the university as an institution. Through the 

 hasty expansion, already referred to, the machinery of the university — 

 teaching, looking over papers, grading, giving credits, establishing 

 standards, etc. — has grown into such proportions that there is little 

 time and energy left for anything else. The enforced result is that 

 the prevailing point of contact between students and instructors has 

 come to be in terms of their proper advancement and grading in the 

 curriculum, and what they must and must not do while resident in the 

 institution. I appeal to those present who have spent a number of 

 years as instructors in colleges and universities whether nine tenths of 

 the time of the faculty meetings is not given up to such questions as 

 marking systems, giving of grades, granting degrees, penalties for 

 delinquencies, admission and classification of students, control of ath- 

 letics, regulation of social affairs, and the like, which have nothing to 

 do, except indirectly, with the inner personal life of students. From 

 the University of Plato in Athens, Plotinus in Rome, Abelard in Paris, 

 and the College of Mark Hopkins in America, we have traveled far. 

 We catch glimpses in the New England days of what was called among 

 professors, a hunger for the souls of students. Those days will never 



