January 21, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



79 



means of maintaining the essential forces 

 in a free people without peasantry, so is 

 it necessary also to safeguard the independ- 

 ence of the institution that holds the teach- 

 ers. Every institution is entitled to its own 

 life. 



It would be a vast misfortune if all our 

 state educational institutions were made to 

 be uniform in procedure, even when they 

 are of the same grade or rank. Diversity 

 is the order of nature. We are now run 

 wild in this country in the application of 

 so-called efSciency systems to institutions 

 and agencies that in the nature of their 

 purpose ought to be of the spirit rather 

 than of the letter. Often these systems do 

 not really represent efficiency, but the effort 

 of officers and clerks without either vision 

 or discretion, and perhaps supercilious, to 

 make all things uniform; and more time 

 and money may be lost in this effort than is 

 saved in the purchase of supplies or in the 

 stoppage of the leaks. It is a serious case 

 to deprive the responsible officer of an in- 

 stitution of the right to exercise his dis- 

 cretion. 



It is a gross mistake to suppose that man- 

 agement systems usually applicable to a fac- 

 tory can be applied to a college or a univer- 

 sity, or to an experiment station or a re- 

 search laboratory, and for the very good 

 reason that the products are wholly unlike, 

 — manufactured goods in the one case, hu- 

 man souls and scientific truth in the other. 

 So also are the methods of procedure un- 

 like — time-work and a measurable output 

 in the one case, study, reflection, mental 

 recuperation, inspiration, soul-service in 

 the other. The institutions must be al- 

 lowed to become what they are intended to 

 be. 



We are face to face with a struggle to 

 keep educational institutions free not so 

 much from political control as from the 

 deadening domination of fiscal offices. A 



well-known professor in a college of agri- 

 culture writes me that his institution has 

 now become so efficient that he loses one 

 third of his time from all productive work ; 

 and another declares that frequently he 

 spends an entire day in making reports that 

 have no significance except to maintain a 

 scheme of administration and which could 

 be performed just as well by a ten-dollar 

 clerk. All this means that we are in imme- 

 diate danger of developing in our institu- 

 tions a set of administrative officers, con- 

 trolling affairs, who are separate in spirit 

 from the real work of research and educa- 

 tion. To this tendency add the present 

 peril of similar despotism from state officers, 

 and you have a slowly developing method 

 of strangulation that may well cause alarm. 



If you ask me how we are to avoid these 

 duplications and conflicts between state in- 

 stitutions, then I reply that the remedy lies 

 in the constitution of the institutions them- 

 selves and not in the method of governance. 

 You can not bring together, by any means 

 of overhead regulation, institutions that in 

 themselves are inharmonious. You may al- 

 lay the hostilities, by arbitrary regulation 

 you may prevent duplication, but this is 

 not a solution, but only an adjustment ; and 

 the arbitrary regulation of finances and ac- 

 counts win inevitably in the end control 

 the educational policies of the institutions, 

 and will ultimately deprive them of inde- 

 pendent free-spirited presidents and lead- 

 ers. The danger lies in the future rather 

 than in the present. The real remedy for 

 such situations rests with the constitution 

 or the legislature (or with bodies to which 

 it delegates legislative authority) to define 

 the purposes and the spheres of the insti- 

 tutions; with their charts before them, the 

 institutions then undertake each its own 

 voyage. 



There is still another aspect to this un- 

 fortunate hostility between state institu- 

 tions. It is the championship of the insti- 



