PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 605 



The writer does not advocate exclusive use of home talent. On the 

 contrary, he urges very general exchange, but when a state has nothing 

 suitable for its own use exchange is impossible — it can only import. 



If scholarship is worth while, if knowledge is of any value, and 

 research productive of good, then this condition of affairs is utterly 

 intolerable. The change to a better simply must and will be made, 

 for no community high-minded, sensitive and capable as the south is 

 will do anything other than welcome an honest description of things 

 as they are, and then wherever not creditable set about to correct them. 



In this case the task is a difficult one, but the need of it more than 

 manifest, and the task weighs first and heaviest upon the presidents of 

 the universities. Power implies duty, and theirs in the main is the 

 power to shape the destiny of their institutions, and through them of 

 the communities, the states and the nation of which they are a vital part. 



"Wherever the president of an institution gives no hearty encourage- 

 ment to first-class attainments, wherever creative ability is held to dis- 

 qualify a man for a position in a university rather than to be the first 

 essential, at that place is stagnation and death in all that stimulates 

 the scholar to his noblest efforts, and at best only a lot of weary task- 

 masters driving to their unwilling grinds so many human phonographs 

 that give back just what they have taken down of the words of another. 



It may not be the university president of the south that is to blame 

 for the origin of the sterile condition of scholarship in his section, but 

 it is to him we must look for the needed change. He may find the 

 labor difficult, but it is possible and that is sufficient. He can not claim 

 that his students are without the ability to follow the leadership of a 

 master, for in the north and in Europe, wherever they have the chance, 

 they do follow masters, and follow them to a purpose. Nor can paucity 

 of material equipment any longer be claimed, since many of the southern 

 institutions are equipped far beyond the extent indicated by the results 

 turned out, and have been for a long while. Indeed for many kinds of 

 creative work the necessary equipment is not great, and besides there 

 are a number of sources from which the capable and the active often 

 can secure substantial aid. Then, too, cooperation with one or another 

 of the various scientific bureaus of the national government is eminently 

 practical and because of the many mutual benefits earnestly to be 

 desired. The physicist, for instance, if so inclined, can with but small 

 expense take up the studies of atmospheric electricity, sky polarization, 

 insolation, or any one or more of the many other interesting meteorolog- 

 ical phenomena that are always with him, but which are not yet fully 

 understood. In no other way could he add more to the advancement 

 of his own subject, while at the same time he would be enriching the 

 science of meteorology and thereby improving the art of forecasting. 

 This is only one of many possible suggestions for even the physicist, 

 and similar ones could be made in connection with other branches of 



