ACADEMIC ASPECTS OF ADMINISTRATION 335 



Yet this tinge of hopefulness tends to fade when the same writer 



records that the 



Czar of Russia has restored to the professors the right to elect their rectors 

 and deans at the same time that the trustees of one of the largest American 

 universities have taken the vested right to elect their deans from the faculties 

 without even asking their opinion or communicating to them their fiat. 



The same writer says: 



The administration imposed on universities, colleges and school systems 

 is not needed by them, but simply represents an inconsiderate carrying over of 

 methods current in commerce and politics. The private institutions of the 

 east, with Chicago and Stanford, have been dependent on gifts from the modern 

 knights of industry, and the state institutions have been dependent on legis- 

 lative appropriations. It is no wonder that the methods of commerce and 

 politics have infected them. We have an absolute and absentee board of trus- 

 tees, with sometimes a small group that takes an active interest in the situa- 

 tion, but usually an almost complete delegation of legislative, judicial and 

 executive functions to one man, the president. When the wisdom of letting 

 a man lord it over an aggregate of employees instead of conferring with a 

 company of scholars is questioned, the answer is the efficiency with which the 

 autocrat gets things done. The president gets money and students, and builds 

 marble palaces. . . . The marble palaces may be mausoleums for the preserva- 

 tion of the corpses of dead ideas and monuments erected to the decay of 

 learning. 



Another student of the field — not a professor — wholly disinterested 

 and surely unprejudiced tells us that 



Young men of power and ambition scorn what should be reckoned the 

 noblest of professions, not because that profession condemns them to poverty, 

 but because it dooms them to a sort of servitude. 



And again: 



Unless American college teachers can be assured that they are no longer 

 to be looked upon as mere employees paid to do the bidding of men who, how- 

 ever courteous or however eminent, have not the faculty's professional knowl- 

 edge of the complicated problems of education, our universities will suffer 

 increasingly from a dearth of strong men, and teaching will remain outside the 

 pale of the really learned professions. The problem is not one of wages ; for 

 no university can become rich enough to buy the independence of any man who 

 is really worth purchasing. 



Lastly I shall cite at length and should like to cite in full a notable 

 editorial in the Dial. The writer notes, as do others, that the vital 

 difficulty lies in our mode of thinking about these problems : 



Material and commercial modes of thinking prevail so largely in our 

 national consciousness, and impose themselves so masterfully upon our nar- 

 rowed imagination, that most people are ready to accept without hesitation 

 their extension into the domain of our intellectual concerns, particularly into 

 that of the great concern of education. Why, it is naively asked, why should 

 not the methods that we apply with such pronounced success to the manage- 

 ment of a bank or a railway prove equally efficient in the management of a 



