Marcu 29, 1912] 
college trustee needs to get a clearer per- 
spective as to his obligations and those of 
his college. 
An institution of large income and high 
standing applied to the Carnegie Founda- 
tion for the retirement of a dean, a man 
seventy years old, who had rendered to his 
institution a long and distinguished service, 
and who stood high in the affections of the 
old students. The retiring allowance was 
voted, in view of the long service and schol- 
arly character of this man, and it only be- 
came known months later that the trustees 
had arranged, in case the pension were not 
eranted, to dismiss this faithful servant on 
the ground of advanced age. 
The reason for this lack on the part of 
college trustees of that sense of responsi- 
bility for the old servant which is so 
striking a feature of modern civilization 
does not lie in any extraordinary callous- 
ness on the part of college trustees. It 
arises simply out of the conditions of our 
American colleges as related to our educa- 
tional problems. The college trustee has 
been so trained that he looks upon any such 
expenditure as wholly outside of those pur- 
poses for which the college can spend its 
money. Not infrequently a trustee puts 
his hand into his own pocket to relieve (at 
least temporarily) the situation of a 
broken-down teacher, when his conscience 
would not allow him to spend a’cent of the 
college money for such a purpose. Exactly 
the same thing happens in churches. An old 
and worn-out pastor is turned out to spend 
the remnant of his days in abject poverty 
—helped out now and then by casual gifts 
or meagre pensions, while the officers of the 
congregation would feel hurt at any sueg- 
gestion that they had acted ungenerously. 
Yet it seldom occurs to them that the affec- 
tionate support of an old and faithful 
servant through his declining years would 
probably be the most christian act that the 
SCIENCE 
483 
congregation could perform. This whole 
matter has not yet been brought within the 
perspective of college trustees. The time 
has come when this must be done. It is 
probably true that only a few colleges are 
in a position to maintain a satisfactory and 
generous pension system for all their teach- 
ers, but no college that is prepared to edu- 
cate youth with fair efficiency is exempt 
from the obligation to make modest provi- 
sion for those who have served it long and 
faithfully and who have come to the limit 
of their working capacity. This is simply 
one of the ordinary obligations of human 
society which all corporations in a civilized 
christian community must acknowledge. 
It is worth more to the education of young 
men to provide a decent support for an old 
teacher than to build athletic fields or even 
to add a new dormitory. On the other 
hand, a broken but deserving teacher, 
turned out to shift for his remaining years 
as best he may, is a spectacle which does 
more harm to the cause of education than 
can be atoned for by large classes of under- 
graduates, or a graduate school conducted 
at the expense of the legitimate work of the 
college. In a word, the obligation to care 
for the old servant is one of the funda- 
mental obligations of human society, and 
the college can not evade it without ineur- 
ring the sort of penalty which follows the 
evasion of all obligations. According to 
its ability, every college, however modest, 
must meet this obligation. The board of 
trustees that turns out an aged and faithful 
teacher with the phrase, ‘‘Of course the 
college can do nothing,’’ simply does not 
appreciate that such an act is a blow at the 
integrity of the educational cause that they 
are supposed to serve, and that it is better 
for the college itself to make its economies 
elsewhere than in the evasion of the old- 
fashioned christian obligation to care for 
those who have borne the burden and heat 
