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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 975 



red flag to an enraged beast. To them the 

 tmiversity president is " the black beast 

 in the academic jungle." They cut him to 

 pieces with their ridicule, they lash him 

 with their wit, they make him ridiculous 

 with a humor that seems inexhaustible. 



" I once incited," says the distinguished 

 editor of Popular Science Monthly and of 

 Science, Professor Cattell, of Columbia 

 University,- — " I once incited one of my 

 children to call her doll Mr. President, on 

 the esoteric ground that he would lie in 

 any position in which he was placed." 

 The time of the university president, he 

 tells us, is ' ' largely occupied with trying 

 to correct or to explain the mistakes he 

 has made, and the time of the professor is 

 too much taken up with trying to dissuade 

 the president from doing unwise things or 

 in making the best of them after they have 

 been done." 



Now, to be perfectly fair to Professor 

 Cattell, it must be admitted that his hatred 

 of university presidents is not against 

 them as men, who, he admits, may be as 

 truthful, honest and kind as the rest of the 

 faculty, but against them as the products 

 of a system that is calculated to produce 

 sycophants, and bosses, and liars. It is 

 doubtless true that some men, possibly 

 many, have become college presidents not 

 because of their merit, but because they 

 are skillful politicians or successful wire- 

 pullers, and it is also true that 

 such men, when once they get into 

 office, usually employ the methods of poli- 

 ticians and bosses. Such men build up a 

 machine, gather around them a body of 

 time-servers loyal to the administration, 

 who also help to create for the real scholars 

 of the university a chilling and forbidding 

 atmosphere. Such presidents soon drive 

 from their universities all the independent 

 and high-spirited professors who can find 

 places in other institutions and make 



miserable the lives of such professors as 

 are too old to get away or are too ill-starred 

 to find elsewhere an opening suited to their 

 talents and attainments. Professor Cattell 

 is doing a real service in pouring upon 

 such men the contempt and ridicule they 

 deserve. Such executives, whether they 

 are found as principals of normal schools, 

 superintendents of city systems, college 

 heads or university presidents, deserve to 

 be hung for high treason against the great 

 republic of letters and the commonwealth 

 of science. But let us not forget that they 

 are the creatures, not the creators of a sys- 

 tem that threatens, unless reformed, to 

 turn over the temples of learning to educa- 

 tional gamblers and money changers, to 

 bosses and politicians, to all the foul and 

 loathsome creatures who, while " cowering 

 to those above them always trample on 

 those beneath them " — I mean the system 

 that places in the hands of an external, ir- 

 responsible board the power to govern and 

 to control in minutest details a great seat 

 of learning. 



Before I proceed further let me declare 

 as emphatically as may be that the vast 

 majority of trustees whom I have known 

 I esteem as generous and upright men. It 

 is the system, not the individuals that I am 

 attacking. I wish that Professor Cattell 

 could be induced to turn his vast learning 

 to the consideration of this more funda- 

 mental question, and to let his illuminat- 

 ing wit play upon it — the question of the 

 governing board of a university. May we 

 not hope that President Pritchett of the 

 Carnegie Foundation may get one of the 

 really great educators of the world, or 

 perhaps a committee of such educators, to 

 write an authoritative bulletin on the func- 

 tions and the limitations of the governing 

 board, and place it in the hands of every 

 school trustee in the land. This and other 

 good literature bearing on the same subject 



