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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXV. No. 633 



vanee. The more highly one prizes an academic 

 grade, the greater should be the possibilities of 

 this differentiation. 



While academic life is not strictly comparative 

 with business life, they should have certain 

 analogous elements. It is easy to get one-thou- 

 sand-dollar men in business, much more difficult 

 to get five-thousand-dollar men, and almost im- 

 possible to get ten-thousaud-dollar men, but a 

 ten-thousand-dollar man is worthy of his hire. 

 So in the university, the ten-thousand-dollar man 

 should have his corresponding reward. Of 

 course, the elements which make for success in 

 an academic career are not the same as in a busi- 

 ness career. The standards are diflferent, the aim 

 is different, but what I want to bring out is that 

 the value of men is so different that they can 

 not be fairly classified by the ordinary academic 

 grades, and, while in the university the money 

 reward is not the sole object of the professor's 

 work, it should form a certain element of it. 



19. 



In my opinion professorships within the same 

 university should unquestionably be placed upon 

 a like finanpial basis. 



I find the most emphatic argument for this in 

 the evils that almost inevitably accompany any 

 other disposition. Those evils, indeed, seem to 

 me a most serious menace to the amelioration — - 

 BO much needed — of the professor's standing. In 

 the absence of such a system or practise, the 

 individual professor is likely to spend serious 

 efforts in enforcing his claims to securing such 

 advances in salary as he can effect. Most 

 directly and most frequently he encourages offers 

 of affiliation with other institutions. He par- 

 ticularly suggests, when such inquiries come, the 

 necessity of additional financial inducements to 

 secure his transfer; at other times the university 

 aspiring to secure his services at once holds out 

 the lure of additional income. If he accepts such 

 an offer, he is likely to find in the new environ- 

 ment that he has been engaged at a salary 

 denied to many of his colleagues of longer serv- 

 ice, of greater adaptation to the needs of that 

 institution, of equal reputation and attainments. 

 Such a position should be more generally em- 

 barrassing than it seems to be. If he declines 

 the overture, he is likely to yield to the tempta- 

 tion to demand of his present authorities that 

 they compensate him for the loss he has incurred 

 by declining the ' call.' The commercial standards 

 that thus enter degrade the proper appreciation 

 of academic standards and prevent the emphasis 



upon the essential factors of academic compensa- 

 tion. There are to-day many men of first-rate 

 character and value receiving most inadequate 

 salaries, while in the same faculty are a few men 

 with far better incomes whose greater freedom 

 from care is due merely to the fact that they 

 entered the institution at a later period of its 

 history and have not to their credit years of self- 

 sacrificing service. Such a university actually 

 punishes those who have aided to build it up. 

 It may be replied that this difficulty could be 

 avoided by increasing salaries from within aa 

 generally as from without. I reply that the 

 spirit of this method is against such procedure; 

 and that a complete adjustment would amount 

 to nothing less than an equality of salary. 



I shall say little of the feeling of personal in- 

 justice, of jealousies small and great, proper and 

 improper, that arise under the system that allows 

 each man to fight for himself alone. I mention 

 the fact that, struggle against it as we will, men 

 will be rated by the salaries they receive. Aca- 

 demic democracy is hampered in its expression, 

 and men are judged by false standards. It is but 

 an exaggerated expression of this attitude — 

 something that hangs in the air and contaminates 

 — that induced more than one graduate student 

 in a certain but nameless institution to look up 

 in the proper report the salaries of the several 

 professors under whom study was contemplated, 

 and to choose those with the largest figures to 

 their credit. They wanted their ' majors ' only 

 under at least ' $3,000 ' men. This is the rating 

 that figures in the Sunday issues of our great 

 and representative dailies. 



The fact that the only practicable mode of 

 avoiding the inevitable difficulties, injustices, in- 

 equalities, and pernieiofts influences of a system 

 that leads each man to struggle for himself, is to 

 adopt the system of equality: this alone seems to 

 me an adequate reason for the system I advocate. 

 Yet it seems to me that equally with the avoid- 

 ance of evils is there in the ' equality ' system 

 the greatest good, alike in principle and in prac- 

 tise. The very freedom from care and unrest and 

 uncertainty, and the consequent emphasis placed 

 upon the incumbent's devoting himself to his 

 proper interests, is a great step in itself. Nor 

 can I see why any president or board should 

 desire to complicate matters by attempting to dif- 

 ferentiate among equally, or nearly equally, 

 worthy men by a financial standard. It is some- 

 times said that the business of a president or of 

 a board is to translate academic utility into 

 money values, a task for which a composite of 



