850 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXII. No. 574. 



condemns them to poverty, but because it 

 dooms them to a sort of servitude. The 

 American lawyer or physician is subject 

 only to the judgment of his peers — that is, 

 to the well-established code of his profes- 

 sion. The American teacher, on the con- 

 trary, especially in the public schools, is 

 not only subject to— he is often wholly at 

 the mercy of — unsympathetic laymen. 



This condition is inherent in the Amer- 

 ican system of education, and neither can 

 nor should be wholly abrogated. The 

 teacher serves the public (for even an 

 endowed college is a public institution) 

 and must rest, therefore, under some of a 

 servant's disabilities. Yet, without im- 

 pairing the proper powers of school or col- 

 lege trustees, it is possible, I believe, to 

 give teachers — or rather to restore to them 

 — so much of authority, dignity and inde- 

 pendence as shall raise teaching to the pro- 

 fessional status of the law— to a position, 

 that is, where it will commend itself to the 

 most ambitious and the best-trained youth. 



The medieval universities, as you know, 

 were preeminently nurseries and citadels 

 of intellectual freedom and political dem- 

 ocracy. They were 'essentially federated 

 republics, the government of which per- 

 tained either .to the whole body of the 

 masters * * * or to the whole body of the 

 students.' Moreover, 'what slight subor- 

 dination did exist was, in the beginning, 

 to the ecclesiastical and, later, to the civil 

 power.' The American universities, also, 

 from the frontier college of Harvard, in 

 1636, to the latest frontier (if there now is 

 any such place) college of the plains — have 

 been strongholds of intellectual freedom; 

 but in their administration they have been 

 profoundly subordinate, in the early days 

 to the ecclesiastical, and later — directly or 

 indirectly — to the civil power. 



This subordination, under the stress of 

 circumstances, has progressed until, as 

 President Pritchett points out in a recent 



admirable address, the American univer- 

 sity has become an autocracy, wholly for- 

 eign in spirit and plan to our political 

 ideals and little short of amazing to those 

 models of thoroughgoing democracy, the 

 German universities. And this absolutism 

 of the American university is not, as in the 

 days of the scholastics, an autocracy of 

 teachers and scholars; it is an autocracy 

 of ecclesiastical or lay trustees. Whence 

 has arisen this astonishing inversion? 

 Why does the very fountain of our higher 

 life present this paradox ? Mainly, I think, 

 because the European universities grew 

 from within, while those of this country 

 have been established from without. The 

 old theocracy of New England, the younger 

 democracies of her splendid daughters, cre- 

 ated colleges to fit youth for service in 

 church or commonwealth, and they placed 

 over them men of notable authority. In 

 the east, the hands of both church and 

 state have been largely withdrawn; but in 

 their place have appeared the dead or liv- 

 ing hands of donors demanding that their 

 gifts be safeguarded by stable and sub- 

 stantially irremovable trustees. College 

 and public school funds are no less sacred 

 than they are colossal; and those who ad- 

 minister them- assume high legal as well as 

 moral responsibility. But this large liabil- 

 ity has been more than balanced by the 

 gift of almost absolute powers — powers 

 surpassing, perhaps, those of any other 

 bodies. I do not know how it is here; 

 but in Massachusetts the school boards 

 are virtually despotic, far transcending in 

 authority those sturdy democrats, their 

 parent town meetings. 



Excepting those strictly denominational, 

 the balance of the extraordinary legal 

 powers given to college trustees has grad- 

 ually passed from the hands of the clergy 

 into those of laymen chosen, as a rule, for 

 their standing as financiers rather than as 

 educators. From many aspects this has 



