282 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



members of the faculty moved in. That some rooms were to be used 

 for classes in mathematics and others for work in modern languages 

 and still others for English had apparently in no way affected the plans. 



Nor are these conditions necessarily due to differences in the periods 

 at which college buildings have been erected — they prevail on more than 

 one campus where the greater number of buildings have been erected in 

 a single generation during the incumbency of a single president. Nor 

 are they always due to the selection of different architects — in more than 

 one instance a single architect has planned the greater number of the 

 buildings of a college campus, yet he has been the chief of sinners in 

 including among the buildings he has planned those that range in style 

 from the classical period through the gothic, romanesque and renais- 

 sance to a Queen Anne house, a French chateau, or a feudal castle for 

 the president. 



The Architectural Record has recently published a series of articles 

 by Montgomery Schuyler on the architecture of American colleges and 

 more than one of the articles has emphasized the lack of harmony and 

 the absence of a consistent plan in the buildings of a college campus. 

 The author writes of one college : 



Seemingly, there has been enough money spent on buildings to execute such 

 a scheme (of unity and variety) handsomely and impressively. The actual result 

 is simply deplorable in the crudity of the parts and the absence of anything that 

 can be decently called a whole. . . . There is not a trace of a general plan. The 

 disposition of the buildings in relation to one another is as higgledy-piggledy as 

 the design of each considered by itself. 



The architecture of college buildings and the planning of a college 

 campus may not seem to come within the range of a discussion of the 

 next college president, but in fact nothing else in the domain of educa- 

 tion seems to illustrate so well and so vividly the incongruities of the 

 educational system itself. What the college is in brick and mortar, 

 that the college is in its organization and in its educational plan. He 

 who runs may read the incongruities of the college campus, but he who 

 loiters has perceived but dimly, if at all, the intellectual incongruities 

 reflected through it. 



In view of these conditions who shall be the next college president? 

 A former university president at the recent inauguration of one of his 

 successors enumerates some twenty qualifications that should be found 

 in the man who fills the office, although he states that "the qualities 

 which enter into the making of an ideal college president are very 

 widely distributed and never can be found represented in a great many 

 men." 



The members of a college faculty are ready to accept this statement 

 of the difficulty of finding the ideal college president. But unlike 

 members of boards of trustees they are concerning themselves not with 

 candidates for the position of president, but with the organization of 



