806 
fessorships should be subject to the approval of a 
board of advisers constituted for each department, 
consisting, say, of two members of the department, 
two experts in the subject outside the university 
and two professors from related departments. The 
final election should be by a university senate, 
subject to the veto of the trustees. The same 
salaries should be paid for the same office and 
the same amount of work. The election should 
be for life, except in the case of impeachment 
after trial.* The division should have financial as 
well as educational autonomy. Its income should 
be held as a trust fund and it should be encour- 
aged to increase this fund. 
5. The departments or divisions should elect rep- 
resentatives for such committees as are needed 
when they have common interests, and to a senate 
which should legislate for the university as a whole 
and be a body coordinate with the trustees. It 
should have an executive committee which would 
meet with a similar committee of the trustees. 
There should also on special occasions be plenums 
of divisions having interests in common and plen- 
ums of all the professors or officers of the univer- 
sity.2 There should be as much flexibility and as 
complete anarchy throughout the university as is 
consistent with unity and order. 
It seems that the 299 replies expressing 
the opinion of the writers on this paper 
“The greatest possible care should be exercised 
in the selection of professors. Instructors and 
lecturers should be freely admitted to the univer- 
sity, but the professorship should be maintained as 
a high office. The alternative to permanence of 
tenure is competition for prizes under honorable 
conditions, but in this case salaries must be as 
large as the incomes of leaders in law, medicine 
and engineering. It is more economical and prob- 
ably conduces to greater dignity and honor to pay 
adequate but moderate salaries with permanence 
of tenure, as in the army or the supreme court. 
Advances in salary should be automatic, as at 
Harvard, but there might to advantage be a few 
professorships with comparatively high salaries— 
the same as that of the presidency—vacancies in 
which would be filled by cooptation or by election 
‘by the faculties. 
¥ Professors and other officers should not be dis- 
tracted from their work of teaching and research 
‘by administrative politics. But they should select 
their administrative officers and legislative com- 
mittees and have opportunity to make proposals 
and vote on questions of educational policy. 
Voting by mail and the fly-leaf method of discus- 
sion of the English universities could be adopted 
to advantage. An elected executive committee of 
the faculties meeting with the executive committee 
of the trustees is a feasible method of improving 
the existing academic situation. 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 908 
represent with considerable accuracy the 
existing academic sentiment in this coun- 
try among those who have been most suc- 
cessful in their work. They are all from 
men in the natural and exact sciences, who 
form somewhat less than half our univer- 
sity professors, but there is no reason to 
suppose that their colleagues in other de- 
partments would differ as a class in their 
attitude on academic questions. I wrote 
to scientific men because I had a list of 
those of highest standing and am person- 
ally acquainted with most of them. It may 
be that in some cases men were more likely 
to reply because they agreed with my views 
and were more likely to emphasize their 
agreement than their dissent. As a psy- 
chologist by trade, I judge, however, that 
this is more than balanced by the opposite 
tendency to react by objecting and to 
argue against a proposition proposed. 
Probably the replies of younger men and 
of less successful men would be more 
radical and more opposed to the existing 
system of university control. 
The letters are well worth a careful 
reading. We are told that every question 
has two sides; as a matter of fact many 
questions are polygons. The problems of 
the administration of an educational insti- 
tution have many sides and many angles. 
They differ completely in the small college 
and in the large university, in the newer 
and in the older institutions, in the state 
university and in the private corporation. 
My paper was written with reference to 
the large endowed universities, especially 
those which have enjoyed or suffered a 
rapid growth in size and scope. The re- 
plies are from institutions of all kinds. 
Those who hold chairs in the smaller 
colleges may find a system fairly ade- 
quate to their needs which would be 
undesirable in our large universities. 
Those in state universities may regard as 
