THE NEXT COLLEGE PRESIDENT 277 



win a wavering man to the side of law and order while suspicion and 

 distrust send him to the side of lawlessness and crime. But no hope 

 seems to be held out for the college faculty — it ever hears from the plat- 

 form and through the press that it is incapable of doing business and 

 the discouraging feature of the situation is that the American college 

 faculty is coming to believe it. 



It is also asserted that the college professor does not wish to take a 

 larger part than he now has in the direction of educational policy. " I 

 have heard a good deal about the growing impatience at the 'amount of 

 business detail forced on the faculty because of this faculty form of 

 government" is the statement made by a university president. "By 

 far the greatest number in every faculty neither desire to assume admin- 

 istrative burdens nor are extraordinarily competent for such tasks" is 

 the opinion of another president. Even so eminent a man as ex-President 

 Eliot has shown much solicitude on this point when he says : 



Most American professors of good quality would regard the imposition of 

 duties concerning the selection of professors and other teachers, the election of 

 the president and the annual arrangement of the budget of the institution as a 

 serious reduction in the attractiveness of the scholar's life and the professional 

 career. 



The near-professor from the safe retreat of his desk in the middle 

 west ventures to ask by what authority ex-President Eliot presumes to 

 speak for the American college professor, why he assumes that the 

 election of a college president, once in say forty years, should be a more 

 serious reduction in the attractiveness of the scholar's life than is a vote 

 every four years for the electors of the federal president, why the 

 cooperative annual arrangement of the budget of an institution should 

 be a greater infringement on the professional career than is the unaided 

 preparation of the domestic budget with a limited salary and a growing 

 family, why the implication is made that it is only professors of bad 

 quality who grasp at things so far beyond their reach as the selection 

 of professors and other teachers, and why indeed a representative of 

 Puritan ISTew England could imagine that even a college professor would 

 falter in his duty if that duty led him for a brief period from the 

 attractiveness of the scholar's life into the more arduous paths heretofore 

 trodden alone by the college president. 



Another reason assigned is the infirmities of temper charged up to 

 the college professor. One president complains : 



Truly the academic animal is a strange beast. If he can not have some- 

 thing at which he can growl and snarl, he will growl and snarl at nothing at all. 



Another reports that he has to deal with men "not altogether ripe 

 for translation." It is a member of a board of trustees who arraigns the 

 entire faculty over which he and his fellow trustees exercise jurisdiction 

 with the seven deadly sins of "jealousy," "bickerings," "professional 



