804 
kins or Thomas Arnold has been the soul 
of the institution. As Matthew Arnold 
writes in ‘‘Rugby Chapel’’ 
. .. to thee was it given 
Many to save with thyself; 
And, at the end of thy day, 
O faithful shepherd! to come, 
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand. 
As a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity at the zenith of its great achieve- 
ment, I had again opportunity to witness 
the system of presidential autocracy under 
favorable conditions. The university was 
dominated by one man who was per- 
sonally responsible for and to its dozen 
professors and two hundred students. 
But the patriarchal system is of necessity 
limited to the small institution, and it is 
scarcely fitted to the democracy of the 
twentieth century. In a residence of six 
years at Huropean universities, I had ex- 
perience of the educational system, but 
though I was assistant at the University of 
Leipzig and lecturer at the University of 
Cambridge, I was at that time indifferent 
to administrative methods. These have 
been increasingly foreed on my attention 
since my appointment as professor at the 
University of Pennsylvania and lecturer 
at Bryn Mawr College, and for the twenty 
years during which I have been professor 
at Columbia University. 
I reviewed the problems of university 
control in a short article printed in 
SCIENCE some six years ago. This was re- 
printed with certain added footnotes, and 
at the beginning of December sent to our 
leading men of science, who hold or have 
held academic positions, with the following 
note: 
Would you be willing to give your opinion of 
the plan of university control here proposed? If 
you are so kind as to do so, I shall understand 
that I may quote anonymously your reply. 
About 300 replies have been received, 
which are printed practically in full as an 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Von. XXXV. No. 908 
appendix to this paper. The article on 
which the replies were based is as follows: 
UNIVERSITY CONTROL* 
In the colleges from which our universities have 
developed the problem of administration was com- 
paratively simple. The faculty and the president 
met weekly and consulted daily; each was familiar 
with the work of the entire institution; a spirit of 
cooperation and loyalty naturally prevailed. The 
trustees also understood the economy of the college 
and were able to work intelligently for the general 
good. But when a university covers the whole 
field of human knowledge, when it is concerned 
with professional work in divergent directions, 
when it adds research and creative scholarship to 
instruction, when both men and women are ad- 
mitted, when there are 500 instructors and 5,000 
students, it is no longer possible for each trustee 
and for each professor to share intelligently in the 
conduct of the whole institution. We appear at 
present to be between the Scylla of presidential 
autocracy and the Charybdis of faculty and trustee 
incompetence. The more incompetent the faculties 
become, the greater is the need for executive 
autocracy, and the greater the autocracy of the 
president, the more incompetent do the faculties 
become. Under these conditions it appears that 
the university must be completely reorganized on 
a representative basis. It should not be a des- 
potism and it can not be a simple democracy. 
Autonomy should be given to the schools, depart- 
ments or divisions. The administrative, legislative 
and judicial work must be done by experts, but 
they should represent those whom they serve. . 
The present writer ventures to propose tenta- 
tively the following form of organization for our 
larger universities, to be reached as the result of 
a gradual evolution:* 
* Reprinted from Screncr, for March 23, 1906, 
with footnotes added in November, 1911. 
*No sensible person would attempt to reform 
suddenly by a paper constitution a system which 
has developed in response to its environment. The 
boss in politics, the trust magnate in business, the 
university president and school superintendent, 
have probably conduced to a certain kind of effi- 
ciency and to an enlargement more rapid than 
would otherwise have been possible. What a com- 
munity does is dependent on the men who compose 
it rather than on the laws under which they live. 
But a bad system may demoralize the cooperative 
spirit of the group and may select for it individ- 
uals who are not the most desirable. The danger 
of our present system of university control is that 
