266 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
Germany reverses the inconsistency, being politically imperialistic, but 
educationally democratic. Speaking of our own nation he says: 
Among a people so jealous of private rights, university governments have 
assumed a form that we might have expected to see in a land of kings. Euro- 
pean universities have a constitution that might have come from some American 
theorist. American universities are as though founded and fostered in the 
bourne of aristocracy. Europe and America are each harboring what would 
seem properly sacred only to the other. 
There are four or five causes that have brought about too great a 
centralization of authority in the hands of president and faculty, and 
along with it a cleavage of interest of faculty and student body until 
they stand off from one another in a relationship that is not wholesome 
for either. 
1. In the first place, a historic strain of autocracy has come down 
from the old-fashioned schoolmaster. In the early days of America, 
the schoolmaster, with rod and rule if need be, usually a man—not a 
lad of eighteen or a woman or much less a frail girl—was a monarch 
in his realm. He was built, and for a reason, on the lines of a sturdy, 
stern Anglo-Saxon father. He has left us as a heritage his custom and 
conception of imperialistic authority in education along with his in- 
effaceable three “1’s.” The secondary schools were differentiated from 
the common schools. The “head master” developed out of the parent 
stem, the schoolmaster, under the rule that like produces like. He 
was well named, for he was expected to be superior in wisdom and 
masterful in bearing. The college is a specialization of the old acad- 
emy and high school, and has inherited from these many of its ideas 
about curriculum, form of organization and centralized authority. 
2. In the second place, as Professor Stratton has pointed out, our 
higher institutions have received a strain from the form of government 
of the early colonies. These were under the rule of the mother country, 
which rule was effected through a corporation, or a governor, or both. 
They were never elected by the colonists nor selected from among their 
number, but superimposed on them from the mother country. Our 
boards of education are descendants of the early corporations, and the 
university presidents are built after the pattern of the early governors. 
In imperialistic Europe the democratic life of the faculty and the 
university generally, on the contrary, is the direct historical conse- 
quent of the old guilds that were established around the idea of equal- 
ity, fraternity and mutual helpfulness. 
3. In the third place, the higher institutions have reaped the bless- 
ings and also the ills of the naive democracy in which each individual 
is turned loose to do as he pleases, and, being human, chooses to be un- 
duly self regardful. There are many indications that the earlier col- 
leges, established by people whose passion was for equal opportunity, 
