534 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 744 



then is ; if an unwise appointment has been 

 made, the institution should accept the 

 responsibility. 



Permanent tenure of ofSce doubtless 

 implies a continuation of salary or a pen- 

 sion in ease the professor can no longer 

 serve to advantage; and this leaves the 

 difficulty resulting from paying a professor 

 less than he is worth in middle life in order 

 that he may receive more than he is worth 

 in old age. Obviously we must face this 

 situation; but it is emphasized and made 

 worse by the establishment of a uniform 

 and centralized system of pensions. It can 

 be most conveniently met if we are suffi- 

 ciently optimistic to assume that on the 

 average the services of professors over 

 sixty-five years of age are worth to their 

 institutions and to the community the sal- 

 aries that had previously been paid. A 

 professor at this age may become a less 

 efficient teacher in professional and re- 

 quired courses, though this is not always 

 the case. It is, however, by no means cer- 

 tain that he is, on the average, a less de- 

 sirable teacher in advanced and elective 

 courses; or that his scholarship, experience, 

 judgment and poise are not of the utmost 

 advantage to the university. A man of 

 this age may not have new ideas; but his 

 research work and productive scholarship 

 are likely to continue and to be of greater 

 value to the world than the salary he is 

 paid. 



The teachers who have had the greatest 

 influence on the writer are Professor March, 

 of Lafayette College, and Professor Wundt, 

 of Leipzig. Professor March ceased to teach 

 recently at the age of over eighty years 

 and Professor Wundt continues to lecture 

 regularly at the age of seventy-five years. 

 It would have been a serious loss if these 

 great men had ceased to teach at the age of 

 sixty or sixty-five. If I were now begin- 

 ning the study of psychology, I should wish 

 to spend a year under Professor Wundt at 



Leipzig and a year under Professor James 

 at Harvard. I should be able to work 

 under Professor Wundt, but should find 

 that Professor James had been retired on 

 a Carnegie pension in the fullness of in- 

 tellectual vigor. If Mr. Angell can to ad- 

 vantage serve as president of Michigan to 

 the age of eighty and Mr. Eliot can serve 

 as president of Harvard to the age of 

 seventy-five and still retain the chairman- 

 ship of the trustees of the Carnegie Foun- 

 dation, we ha.ve evidence that a dead line 

 can not be drawn at sixty-five. 



The institutions accepting the terms of 

 the Carnegie Foundation for pensions on 

 the basis of age must make retirement on 

 a pension at sixty-five mandatory, or else 

 they must make it a matter of arrangement 

 between the administration and the pro- 

 fessor. Either alternative is unfortunate. 

 If the retirement is mandatory, the institu- 

 tion will lose men whom it can not afford 

 to lose, and professors will be retired who 

 are competent and anxious to continue 

 their work. It will be a poor reward in the 

 academic career to cut men off from the 

 service of their lives and pay them part 

 salary, when in other professions at that 

 age they would probably have continued 

 to be leaders and to have had an income 

 at least twice as large as twenty years be- 

 fore. If the retirement is only permissory 

 an institution might gain temporarily by 

 retiring its less efficient men; but this 

 would be only a mitigated form of the 

 policy of dismissing professors whenever 

 their places can be filled at less cost. Every 

 institution could improve for a time its 

 faculties by dismissing twenty per cent, of 

 its professors; but such an undertaking 

 would in the end be disastrous to the insti- 

 tution and to higher education. If only 

 incompetent professors and those not in 

 favor with the administration are retired 

 at sixty-five, the pension will be far from 

 an honor and by no means a worthy close 



