732 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL. No. 1038 



almost to adopt a slogan, " Delindus est prex" 

 was inevitable. In the Cattell movement 

 abundant incidents of arrogance and arbi- 

 trary, if not usurped, power were collected, 

 and it was even insisted that although charters 

 or conditions of bequests, to say nothing of 

 American tradition, would have to be reversed, 

 it was urged that the president should be only 

 chairman of the faculty, elected perhaps annu- 

 ally by them, and in the literature of this 

 movement we find occasionally the radical 

 plea that some or all of the powers of the 

 board should be turned over to the faculty, 

 who should at least be given control of the 

 annual budget. More lately the movement of 

 protest here is against the autocracy of the 

 dean, whom the president had created in his 

 own image, and who sometimes exercises a 

 power that he would never dare to do, and 

 who in large institutions has constructed a 

 mechanism of rules, methods, procedures, 

 standards, which have almost come to monop- 

 olize the deliberations of the Association of 

 American Universities, which fortunately 

 can not prescribe or legislate for its individ- 

 ual members. University deans have often 

 created rules which they themselves can sus- 

 pend for individuals, and this has greatly 

 augmented their power. It is they largely 

 who have broken up knowledge into standard- 

 ized units of hours, weeks, terms, credits, 

 blocking every short cut for superior minds 

 and making a bureaucracy which represses 

 personal initiative and legitimate ambition. 

 Just now perhaps we hear most remonstrance 

 against head professors and statements that 

 the assistant professors and younger instruct- 

 ors in their departments are entirely at their 

 mercy, that they are burdened with the drudg- 

 ery of drills, examinations, markings, aU at 

 small pay, while their chiefs take the credit, 

 so that the best years of the best young men, 

 who are the most precious asset of any insti- 

 tution, or even of civilization, are wasted. 

 Indeed we have vivid pictures of the hard- 

 ships which often crush out the ambitions of 

 young aspirants for professorial honors and 

 tend to make them, if they ever do arrive, 

 parts of a machine with no ideals of what 



sacred academic freedom really means. 

 Happily now the best sentiment of the best 

 professors now organizing inter-institution- 

 ally to safeguard their own interests and 

 those of their institutions, stands for a most 

 wholesome and needed movement which is 

 sure to prevail. 



So far I submit to you and to my colleagues 

 that Clark University, not through any wis- 

 dom or virtue of its president, although per- 

 haps a little through the fact that he is a 

 teacher and does not spend all his time in or- 

 ganizing, but owing to its small size, its un- 

 precedented absence of rules, its utterly un- 

 trammeled academic freedom, is to-day in a 

 position to lead and not to follow in the wake 

 of this movement. No one here wants auto- 

 cratic personal power, but we do all want the 

 best attainable, whatever it is. Each depart- 

 ment here is almost as independent and au- 

 tonomous as if there were no other. We have 

 no deans, few assistant professors, and so no 

 tyranny of departmental heads, no complaints 

 on the part of students, as in Germany, that 

 we are not doing the best we can for them, 

 so that this world-wide movement for aca- 

 demic reform we ought to consider as a great 

 and new opportunity to us all, trustees and 

 faculties, at this psychological moment to 

 realize our own advantage, and to carefully 

 look over our present system and see if we 

 can not use this opportunity to begin the new 

 quarter century with our lamps retrimmed 

 and burning bright, and alert and profiting by 

 every suggestion that the academic Zeitgeist 

 is now murmuring like the Socratic daemon 

 in our ears. 



Let us, then, look our present situation and 

 ourselves frankly in the face. With the in- 

 defatigable labors of Senator Hoar in secur- 

 ing a just and legal execution of Mr. Clark's 

 difficult will, labors which some of his col- 

 leagues in the board thought almost justified 

 us in calling him our second founder, with a 

 board more active and interested in our af- 

 fairs, external and internal, than ever before, 

 as their cooperation in this commemoration 

 typifies, with our funds better invested and 

 yielding a trifle more than they have ever 



