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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVI. No. 919 



tion whereby each unit should have control 

 over the expenditure of its own funds. I feel 

 that at the present time a large part of the 

 most irritating difiSculties which members of 

 the university faculty encounter concerns the 

 necessity they are under of making a purely 

 personal appeal to the president and trustees 

 instead of being able to distribute as they 

 may think wise a specified portion of the uni- 

 versity funds, and instead of being permitted 

 to augment those funds as~ they may be able. 

 Tour final sentence in paragraph five is a gem. 

 " There should be as much flexibility and as 

 complete anarchy throughout the university 

 as is consistent with unity and order." In 

 other words, there should be a chaste and 

 orderly disorder. This also I sympathize 

 with, though the actuaries give me no reason 

 to hope that I shall survive to see it in opera- 

 tion. In general I feel very strongly that the 

 present situation has many very undesirable 

 features attaching to it, of which not the least 

 is that the president tends too largely to be- 

 come a purely fiscal officer whose interests and 

 outlook are almost wholly financial in char- 

 acter. No doubt this aspect of the great mod- 

 ern university must be cared for, but I think 

 it is a great misfortune that the more purely 

 educational and scientific interests can not be 

 placed upon a more autonomous basis whereby 

 for any given year at least, or indeed for any 

 period of five years, the authorities in charge 

 of a division of the work of the university 

 may know to a nicety the minimum sum at 

 their disposal, and may be permitted to ex- 

 pend it as it seems to them best. The sub- 

 serviency to the president and trustees which 

 the present system breeds is both morally and 

 educationally wasteful in my judgment, and 

 that it produces a destruction of esprit de 

 corps and the higher forms of loyalty is too 

 obvious to be debated. 



In a general way your scheme of univer- 

 sity organization seems to me to be an ad- 

 mirable one, although there are a number of 

 difiiculties which the plan has in my mind. 

 In the first place, I think the plan of opera- 

 tion would work out very much better in an 



organization having a considerable degree of 

 homogeneity than in a university having a 

 very large number of academic and profes- 

 sional departments with little or nothing in 

 common, and frequently with sharply conflict- 

 ing interests. Might it not happen, for ex- 

 ample, in a school of the latter sort, that the 

 professional interests, which are usually rather 

 rabid in their demands on account of their 

 practical value, would completely outweigh 

 those of pure science and academic work? It 

 seems to me that we might expect exactly this 

 to happen when the law, engineering and med- 

 ical faculties are brought into contact with 

 the pure science groups, and it is especially 

 injurious to the interests of the academic and 

 pure science groups that the applied schools 

 have a larger number of faculty members than 

 the academic and strictly scientific bodies. If 

 all productive endowment were divided up so 

 that each general group in the university 

 would have its own funds, and was to all in- 

 tents and purposes an independent school 

 financially, the difficulty would not be so great, 

 but if all the funds were contained in one 

 general endowment I think there would be 

 serious difficulties which would prove most in- 

 jurious to the things most worth while in our 

 university. This is the most serious phase. 

 Secondly, with regard to the constitution of 

 the corporation. It seems to me that the ad- 

 mission of any very considerable body of 

 alumni and members of the community where 

 there is sufficient homogeneity of interests 

 might be all right. On- the other hand, would 

 there not be the danger of getting in those who 

 gain their popularity from their fellows 

 through athletic contests and social position, 

 rather than through real worth or capacity to 

 take part in the deliberations of the corpora- 

 tion? It might also lead to a situation in 

 which the faculty would be compelled to take 

 cognizance of temporary, erratic, social be- 

 liefs. Still, leaving out these difficulties which 

 are not insurmountable, the plan of organiza- 

 tion proposed under (1) is probably better than 

 that in vogue in our institution at the present 

 time. The various provisions provided for 

 under (2) seem to me to be rather desirable. 



