June 27, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



973 



specific departments, the positions are often 

 only nominal in nature and vary so mueli from 

 place to place in their attached duties that it 

 does not seem wise to include them in our 

 discussion. The question arises, then, as to 

 which disciplines out of a given group con- 

 tribute the most men for these executive po- 

 sitions and in what proportions they contrib- 

 ute them. To answer this we selected, from a 

 list of colleges and universities in the United 

 States for the year 1910-11,^ those institutions 

 which are neither denominational nor tech- 

 nically specialized. This list of 177 institu- 

 tions was subdivided into those whose enroll- 

 ment of students was above the 1,000 mark 

 and those whose enrollment was below that 

 mark, with the hope that this crude distinc- 

 tion between the large institution and the 

 small might bring to light a difference in the 

 kind of administrator demanded. The names 

 of the presidents were then looked up in 

 " Who's Who in America " in order to deter- 

 mine their fields of professional interest be- 

 fore they assumed charge of their adminis- 

 trative work. Where interest was considered 

 to be equally divided in several fields, the 

 count was fractionated accordingly. The re- 

 sults are throvni into two classifications: the 

 first may be considered as absolutely deter- 

 mined, the other as relatively determined. 

 Concretely, in the first case, the disciplines 

 are presented in order of rank based upon the 

 per cent, of representation in all the disci- 

 plines found; in the second ease, a half-dozen 

 sciences are chosen, and the relative rank of 

 representation is given in terms of a per cent, 

 based upon the total representation in these 

 few sciences. The selection of these sciences 

 was made on the basis of a possible compari- 

 son of relative worth. Unfortunately there 

 were no available statistics for all disciplines 

 dealt with in the first classification, but in the 

 " Biographical Directory of American Men 

 of Science," ° the author found a scale of pro- 



^ This list was furnished by the World's Alma- 

 nac for that year and corroborated by reference 

 to the Eeport of the Commissioner of Education 

 for the same year. 



= New York, 1911. 



portionate values which served as a means of 

 possible interpretation in the second classifi- 

 cation. In this directory of over 4,000 names, 

 the relative number of men engaged in about 

 a dozen sciences is given. Some of these sci- 

 ences are not represented in our lists and are, 

 therefore, not relevant to this discussion. 

 We are forced to limit ourselves, consequently, 

 to the following six sciences to which are at- 

 tached the corresponding relative per cent, of 

 men engaged in the given activity on the 

 basis of the total number engaged in all of 

 the six activities: biology (27 per cent.), chem- 

 istry (22 per cent.), physics (21 per cent.), 

 geology (14 per cent.), mathematics (10 per 

 cent.), and psychology (6 per cent.). The 

 same method of classification was used with 

 a list of 97 deans of colleges and of college 

 departments of universities which were not 

 specialized in profession, i. e., schools of " ap- 

 plied science," " engineering," " medicine," 

 " theology," etc., were not considered because 

 they usually always demanded an executive 

 whose interest lay in the corresponding field 

 of activity. These names were chosen from 

 the 1910-11 catalogues of 42 leading colleges 

 and universities. 



CLASSIFICATION 1 



■ ■ - ^ - 03 



Theology . . 23 Education . . 20 Mathematics 16 



Mathematics 13 Chemistry .. 15 Class. Lit ... 12 



English 10 Philosophy . 10 English 12 



Education . . 8 Mathematics 9 History .... 10 



Mod. Lang 's 7 Polit. Science 9 Polit. Science 10 



CLASSIFICATION 2 



