September 5, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



321 



remaining years of their lives. Of course 

 rare and splendid exceptions there are, but 

 more and more are able young men scorn- 

 ing the teaching profession as fit only for 

 women and effeminate men. It has been 

 humorously said that in the schools of the 

 future, yea even in the universities, real 

 men teachers will not be found except here 

 and there a stuffed specimen in the uni- 

 versity museum. 



' ' Professor A, ' ' said the president of 

 one of the best southern universities, " is a 

 weak man." 



" Of course he is," replied a well-known 

 professor, himself a teacher of thirty years 

 experience. "The very fact that he is a 

 university professor is proof positive that 

 he's a weak man. Nobody but a weak man 

 or a blank fool would be a university pro- 

 fessor. ' ' 



In all earnestness, I may assert that dur- 

 ing the past ten years I have talked frankly- 

 and sometimes confidentially with scores of 

 able professors concerning the university 

 career, and among them all I have found 

 few men of real ability who have not felt 

 more or less dissatisfied with the profession 

 of teaching. "I love teaching and the 

 work of the investigator," said a distin- 

 guished university professor only a few 

 days ago, ' ' but I feel so helpless and so 

 dependent and so much like an hireling in 

 the position I now hold, that I sometimes 

 long to get out of the whole business. ' ' 



There is something wrong somewhere if 

 conditions such as are depicted even ap- 

 proximately exist. To change these condi- 

 tions, to make the university an attractive 

 place for great scholars and brave thinkers 

 and lofty souls, and not, as it sometimes is, 

 a stronghold for the politician, the time- 

 server, the coward, the sycophant — that is 

 a work worthy of heroes and statesmen and 

 educators. Big endowments for universi- 

 ties are desirable if not indeed necessary, 



but big brave men in universities are 

 equally desirable and far more necessary. 

 Only the greatest men of the nation are 

 great enough to teach and inspire the 

 young men of the nation. That nation is 

 greatest which has in proportion to its 

 population the greatest number of real uni- 

 versities, and that viniversity is greatest 

 which gathers to it the largest number of 

 great men. Tour really big professor 

 would rather exist on a pittance in a uni- 

 versity where he feels free and independent, 

 master of his own soul, than to live luxuri- 

 ously in a splendidly endowed school, de- 

 pendent upon the good will or the caprices 

 of politicians and ward bosses, or shivering 

 in fear of offending some multi-millionaire 

 upon whose bounty his university exists. 



What, then, is the matter with the uni- 

 versity? Scores of able men, whom I 

 much admire, would lay foul hands upon 

 the university president as though he were 

 the cause of our academic slavery. They 

 denounce him as an autocrat and a tyrant 

 who, having seized every prerogative that 

 he did not find nailed down, " holds a Da- 

 mascus blade over other men's lives, 

 careers, reputations." They would see the 

 " presidential office shorn of its unwise 

 and unsafe authority," of its "limelight 

 conspicuousness, " of the "foolish and in- 

 creasing pomp and circumstance " which 

 usually and increasingly attend presiden- 

 tial installations and, in vulgar eyes, trans- 

 form wire pullers and gumshoe educators 

 into great men and commanding figures 

 upon the educational horizon. They would 

 reduce his salary to that of an ordinary 

 professor, have him live in a house not 

 bigger nor better than the houses of his 

 colleagues. Indeed there are in our uni- 

 versities able men and otherwise lovely 

 souls to whom the very sight of a univer- 

 sity president seems to be, if one may judge 

 them by their words, like the waving of a 



