L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 251 
at any rate be qualified by the duties inherent in his membership of that 
institution. If it gives him freedom, he must not give it obloquy in return. 
He will be wise, in many cases, to say, and to say very clearly, that he speaks 
in hisown name, asa private citizen, without any warrant from hisinstitution, 
or any power to bind or conclude his institution in any way by what he says. 
But I do not think that a professor will ever go far wrong if he submits 
himself to the discipline of the profession. The great safeguard of true 
professorial liberty is simply a stern sense of the sanctity of the academic 
vocation, cherished among all its members, and enforced by all its members 
through the sanction of disapproval against an erring colleague. What we 
need is the elaboration by the professors themselves, and the enforcement 
by the professors themselves, of a code of professional conduct. Here at 
any rate, without any subscription to the tenets of guild socialism, and 
without any confession to a creed of the government of the teaching 
profession by itself, one may see a field for professional self-determination. 
It is not exactly an easy thing. Some professors, of a conservative cast 
of mind, will always frown upon their colleagues who are hardier, even 
when they walk within just limits. Others, of more radical propensities, 
will always smile upon a bold colleague, even when he has obviously over- 
shot any conceivable mark. But if the thing be difficult, it is none the less 
needful. 
I turn to consider, in conclusion, the broader theme of the freedom of 
the whole academic community. The medieval university, as its very 
name implies, was a free guild of teachers, or sometimes of teachers and 
scholars. It was not subject to any local authorities (there were none, and 
anyhow it was not local) ; it was hardly subject to the State, for the State 
was a loose federal sort of body, which left all guilds pretty much to their 
own devices ; it might be subject to the Pope, because its members were 
clerks, but it could be turbulently independent even in the face of the 
Pope. There were benefactors—munificent benefactors—who founded great 
colleges within the universities ; but though they were fond of making 
statutes for the government of their colleges, they left opinion alone, for 
the simple reason that there was no need for any sort of control. The 
curriculum was largely a traditional curriculum in the arts ; and if theology 
was sometimes fertile of heresies, there was, at any rate, only a single 
Catholic Church, and all men were members of one communion. The 
modern university is set in a far more tangled web of environment. It is an 
object of lively interest to the State, which may sometimes exert, or seek 
to exert, a control of its teachers and its teaching, and may at any rate 
(I speak of Great Britain) appoint Royal Commissions to inspect and 
statutory commissions to reform its organisation. Local authorities— 
a dominion in Canada; a county or city in England—may interest them- 
selves deeply in what they regard as a local university. Benefactions and 
endowments from private sources may play a large part in determining the 
extent and the direction of university development. A Labour party may 
- demand that the universities shall undertake extra-mural work among the 
working classes ; an organisation such as our National Union of Teachers 
may ask that the universities shall make it their policy to accept and train 
as graduates all the members of the teaching profession in the country. 
_ What has become of the free guild of the Middle Ages? And should the 
free guild of the Middle Ages be our modern ideal ? 
