1 84 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE SMALL COLLEGE AND ITS FACULTY 



Br ONE OF THE PRESIDENTS 



THIS president has been reading an article in the Popular Science 

 Monthly for May entitled " The Small College and Its Presi- 

 dent" — hence these words. 



Probably it is rarely the case, when a number of alumni, each more 

 than fifty years of age, foregather and begin to talk over old times, that 

 some one doesn't tell the story of the time he and others put a cow in 

 the college chapel. These stories can not all be true — there haven't 

 been cows enough. Probably they are more or less fictitious variants 

 of some fundamental cow-myth which originated under those vague 

 conditions commonly described as "mists of antiquity." In a similar 

 way it may fairly be questioned whether the awful condition described 

 in the article to which allusion has been made really exists in concrete 

 form and precisely as set forth in any particular institution. 



If there is a college such as is described in this May article it 

 should certainly be abolished at once. It is a disgrace to the whole 

 system of education in America. It is very difficult to believe that, 

 because of their athletic prowess, athletes are given marks higher than 

 they deserve. It is difficult to believe that the sons of wealthy patrons 

 are unfairly marked in the professors' classbooks and on the registrar's 

 records. Whatever trustees and faculties might think, no body of 

 normal undergraduates would stand for any such treatment of that 

 larger part of their number neither athletic nor rich. 



But the object of this writing is to describe briefly another small 

 college which is believed to be more nearly like the typical American 

 small college. It is something less than one hundred years old. Its 

 undergraduate body numbers perhaps less than three hundred. It is 

 governed by a rather large board of trustees. All but two of them are 

 college graduates, and most of them are graduates of the college over 

 which they now preside. It includes clergymen, lawyers or judges, and 

 business men — bankers, insurance men, manufacturers, merchants — in 

 proportion as the numbers 10, 16 and 20. It is under no ecclesiastical 

 control. The president of the college is ex-officio president of this board 

 of trustees. His powers are nowhere stated or defined in the charter 

 or statutes of the college. It takes a two-thirds vote of the trustees to 

 dismiss him, and he is ex officio a member of various committees. He 

 has two votes in the faculty if he cares to use them — one regularly and 



