33° POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Apollo to make his report and engages the Muses at modest stipends 

 upon condition of good behavior. But in truth there is no danger 

 that the very important services of liberal-minded men of affairs to 

 the maintenance of our universities will go unrecognized. The asso- 

 ciation of such a body as a board of cooperation is at once high token 

 of regard for a high type of citizen, and is of definite benefit to the 

 institution concerned. This contribution of external cooperation is 

 quite in keeping with the genius of our national practical sense. The 

 great and overwhelming misfortune is that its function has been so 

 wholly misunderstood in the light of legal authority and of a popular 

 conception growing out of relations in the business life wholly unre- 

 lated to what must and should obtain in the academic world. When 

 the board recognizes that the university is not a business concern; that 

 it has laws of its own; that the faculty alone can determine the mode 

 of advance within the university, that the position of a professor is 

 that of a counselor, free, authoritative and independent, there will be 

 no externalism in the objectionable sense, but only external coopera- 

 tion. American conditions are individual. We can not copy either 

 the English or the German mode of government. We can secure our 

 own type of efficiency without sacrifice of what is the essential end of 

 all institutions of learning. Hence boards have their place, but a 

 place determined by the subservience to the cultural ends of the uni- 

 versity, which must ever be paramount. Business procedures must be 

 secondary to educational ones; those who control the former should not 

 in the least control the activities, status and decisions of those entrusted 

 with the educational conduct of the university. 



Dominated by this business view — even in its comparatively en- 

 lightened form — comes an imperious demand for results, tangible, 

 visible, audible to the popular sense. The curve of the annual fresh- 

 man crop must not compare unfavorably with that of the other in- 

 digenous products of the soil; new departments with smart heraldings 

 must be added ; the catalogue must put on pages of adipose tissue ; the 

 campus must suggest the inspiring appearance of a western town site. 

 If a stranger had been present at a memorial exercise which I have in 

 mind, he would have concluded that the deceased had been a mason 

 contractor and not a college president. The addresses dwelt with loving 

 fondness upon the buildings erected during the administration, giving 

 the area of the floors in square feet and the cost in dollars. Now quite 

 apart from the conspicuous and vulgar extremes of this attitude, let it 

 be acknowledged in a meek confessional spirit that enough of it obtains 

 in the best of our institutions to decidedly guide the direction of activi- 

 ties and warp them away from the path of true academic progress. 

 This factor helps to account for both externalism and the exaggerated 

 contours of the presidential silhouette. 



