CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY 269 
later age, and must not allow the history of the first five centuries to 
repeat itself. 
The spirit of competition has magnified out of all proportion the 
value of quantity instead of quality. Bigness has bred looseness of 
organization and aloofness of person from person and group from group. 
The tendency toward manifoldness has been augmented by the natural 
law of differentiation, of which specialization is an instance, until our 
institutions are atomistic. Each person has relegated to everybody else 
all responsibility for everything except his own little sphere of interests. 
This differentiation amounts in the long run to radical individualism 
and approximates indifferentism, the worst disease that can affect the 
life of higher institutions. The only excuse for the large university is 
that it may have a more highly organic and intense life than a smaller 
one can have. Growth at the expense of inner coordination, refinement 
of articulation and intensification of the individuality of the whole, is 
a disease, whether in plant, animal or institution. We have grown 
like a boy in his teens as fast as our health would allow. The rapid 
differentiation in general has naturally widened the gap between stu- 
dent and faculty, who are made for each other like eyes and hands. 
The next step, in order to get safely through our stalking educational 
adolescence, must be in the direction of binding up into the life of our 
colleges again, the personal lives of students. 
5. Still another fact must be mentioned that has made of our facul- 
ties against their own will, ruling or governing bodies who are set off 
against a pack of persons supposing themselves to have antithetical 
interests to those of the university as an institution, Through the 
hasty expansion, already referred to, the machinery of the university— 
teaching, looking over papers, grading, giving credits, establishing 
standards, ete.—has grown into such proportions that there is little 
time and energy left for anything else. The enforced result is that 
the prevailing point of contact between students and instructors has 
come to be in terms of their proper advancement and grading in the 
curriculum, and what they must and must not do while resident in the 
institution. I appeal to those present who have spent a number of 
years as instructors in colleges and universities whether nine tenths of 
the time of the faculty meetings is not given up to such questions as 
marking systems, giving of grades, granting degrees, penalties for 
delinquencies, admission and classification of students, control of ath- 
letics, regulation of social affairs, and the like, which have nothing to 
do, except indirectly, with the inner personal life of students. From 
the University of Plato in Athens, Plotinus in Rome, Abelard in Paris, 
and the College of Mark Hopkins in America, we have traveled far. 
We catch glimpses in the New England days of what was called among 
professors, a hunger for the souls of students. Those days will never 
