September 5, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



325 



unusually brilliant writer, " have been 

 handled by men whose ideals were as re- 

 mote from scholarship as the ideals of the 

 New York theater managers are remote 

 from poetry. In the meantime the scholars 

 have been dumb and reticent." 



One more illustration. " It falls just 

 beyond my experience," says Professor 

 Jastrow, of the University of Wisconsin, 

 ' ' to have members of the faculty addressed 

 by a member of the board as ' you men 

 whom we hire. ' It is within my experience 

 to have professors summoned inquisito- 

 rially before a committee of the board to 

 give an account of themselves, the inter- 

 view conducted by the chairman with his 

 feet on the table, and displaying a salivary 

 agility that needs no further description." 

 Such reminiscences, however, as Professor 

 Jastrow well says, carry no sting. They 

 are merely amusing. Such men are apt to 

 be good fellows, or at any rate, open- 

 minded. 



It is really amazing how dependent our 

 universities seem to be upon the legal fra- 

 ternity. I am making no brief against 

 lawyers — the best board member I have 

 ever known was a lawyer, but he was a big 

 one, a great jurist, a profound scholar — 

 but lawyers as a class are usually the 

 worst men on boards because they love to 

 split hairs, whereas big business men are 

 the best because they are accustomed to do 

 big things. 



But to return. What state university 

 president has not encountered some young 

 lawyer, perhaps an alumnus, who has felt 

 it his duty to inaugurate university reform 

 and to match his ignorance of university 

 matters against the combined wisdom of a 

 score of learned professors who have given 

 the best years of their lives to educational 

 problems ? It would be a humorous, if in- 

 deed it were not so often a tragic, spectacle. 

 As well might we call the mediocre lawyer 



of a countiy village to revise the decisions 

 of the Supreme Court and to tell the mem- 

 bers of that august body how to transact 

 the nation's business. 



What president of long experience has 

 not encountered the nouveau riche, the 

 parvenu who, regarding the impecunious 

 college professors as mere hirelings, as 

 mere dirt and rubbish, undertakes to estab- 

 lish policies to prevent rise of salaries and 

 thereby to place the institution upon a 

 sound financial basis. Sometimes, though 

 rarely, one encounters the business man 

 who, feeling how successfully he had con- 

 ducted his department store or factory, 

 begins at once to apply factory methods to 

 the delicate and intricate, the high and 

 holy work of a great educational institu- 

 tion. He also regards the teachers as hire- 

 lings. Is it any wonder that when uni- 

 versity professors find themselves placed 

 in humiliating subjection to men of this 

 stamp they become unhappy, dissatisfied, 

 disgusted even with the university career? 

 Then there is the small demagogue con- 

 tent with any old job that pays his travel- 

 ing expenses and gives him an allowance 

 of five dollars a day. He is not necessarily 

 vicious, but only needy. Presidents have 

 had worse men to deal with. A box of 

 cigars, a good dinner, a bag of peanuts, or 

 even a generous slap on the shoulder, may 

 hold in check for a whole day his mighty, 

 all-consuming passion for reform. 



But there is another type of men some- 

 times found on university boards which I 

 can not adequately describe because of the 

 limitations of the English tongue and the 

 refinement and culture of my audience. 

 He is the pinhead. While great men be- 

 come modest when vested with vast power 

 or supreme authority, the pinhead, 

 although he may be honest, although 

 he will neither lie nor steal, is apt 

 to become the very oracle of wisdom as 



