328 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



because old-time and old-land universities embody such traditions of 

 loyalty and service that we, so distant in our pursuits, yet wander with 

 profound appreciation in their ancient halls. 



But we are modern of the moderns; and nothing is more charac- 

 teristic of our heritage of all the ages than the critical analysis with 

 which we plan and conduct our efforts. The sense of the comprehen- 

 sion of progressive motives and rivalry of influences has been deepened, 

 indeed reconstructed, by the insight into evolutionary procedure that 

 reached its first articulate expression just fifty years ago. The obliga- 

 tion of such insight is the duty to inquire into the forces which we 

 shall strengthen and which antagonize, that we may remain masters of 

 our fate. The evolutionist is neither a fatalist nor a stand-patter; 

 he sees, foresees and directs, and he does this with the sobriety result- 

 ing from an historical conscience, and with the faith in the privilege 

 of rational leadership. We of the academy accordingly hold to the 

 law of the grove; that a university ancient or modern is wholly and 

 vitally an educational institution; that the aims for which it exists are 

 cultural; that its methods must be shaped by its own standards; that 

 the activities of those devoted to its welfare must be freely developed 

 from within and suitably to the cultivation of the ends for which the 

 university alone exists. Eeduced at once to its lowest and to its highest 

 terms, the university is and can be nothing else than an assemblage of 

 men united in the sympathy of pursuit and inspired by community of 

 interest and a common loyalty. That the university shall attract such 

 men and find in them the medium of her purposes, and that such men 

 shall seek the university and find in her the enduring incentive to their 

 best endeavors : this is the ideal that serves as the criterion of the worth 

 of practical measures which now we approach. 



We, the American people, have developed or accepted a type of 

 university administration, to which there is no close, hardly a distant, 

 parallel elsewhere. On a former occasion, having in mind the some- 

 what harsher aspects of the system, I called it government by imposi- 

 tion. Professor Stratton has since then proposed the more acceptable 

 term, externalism. It is then a well-known fact that our universities 

 are governed by boards of trustees or regents, with complete legal 

 authority over the measures proposed by the faculty, over the status 

 of the professors individually and collectively, and always indirectly, 

 usually directly, over educational policies, over the larger complex 

 issues that determine the spirit and the conditions of university ad- 

 vance, and naturally over the ways and means contributory to the 

 realization of all this. In many institutions no act of the faculty is 

 valid unless confirmed or reviewed by the board. For example, so 

 irrelevant an issue as a case of student discipline sends an appeal to 

 the board over the heads of president and faculty, with the not infre- 



