II
The administrative evil of the American university, as typified in Harvard, Mr. Bolles described even more vividly than the social evil. The bare fact of the problem he stated as follows: "In 1840 the college contained 250 students; in 1850, 300; in 1860, 450; in 1870, 600; in 1880, 800; in 1890, 1300; in 1894, 1600." He then pointed out that the only means the authorities have found for meeting this increasing demand on the administrative office is, not to divide the students into separate small bodies each under a single administrator, but to divide the duties of administration among several officers. Thus each of the added officers is required to perform his duty toward the entire student body. It is apparently assumed that he can discharge one duty toward two or three thousand students as intelligently as in former years he could discharge two or three duties toward two or three hundred. By this arrangement the most valuable factor in administration is eliminated—personal knowledge and personal contact between the administrator and his charges. It is said that the members of the administrative board of the college—professors whose time is of extreme value to the university and to the world, and who receive no pay as administrators—sit three hours a night three nights in the week deciding the cases that come before them, not from personal knowledge of the undergraduates concerned, but from oral and documentary reports. "It is only by a fiction that the Recorder [or the Dean, or the member of the administrative board] can be assumed to have any personal knowledge of even a half of the men whose absences he counts, whose petitions he acts upon, and against whose delinquencies he remonstrates; yet the fiction is maintained while its absurdity keeps on growing.... If the rate of growth and our present administrative system are maintained, the Dean and Recorder of Harvard College will [in 1950] be personally caring for 6500 individuals, with all of whom they will be presumed to have an intelligent acquaintance."
Mr. Bolles lived through the period in which a brilliant band of German-trained American professors, having made over our educational system as far as possible on German lines, were endeavoring to substitute German discipline, or lack of it, for the traditional system of collegiate residence which aims to make the college a well-regulated social community. At one time these reformers rejoiced in the fact that Harvard students attended the ice carnival at Montreal or basked in the Bermudan sun while the faculty had no means of knowing where they were and no responsibility for the success of their college work. The Overseers, however, were not in sympathy with the Teutonized faculty, and soon put an end to this; but the reformers were, and perhaps still are, only waiting the opportunity to establish again the Teutonic license. "It is sometimes said," Mr. Bolles continues, "that Harvard may eventually free itself from all its remaining parental responsibility and leave students' habits, health, and morals to their individual care, confining itself to teaching, research, and the granting of degrees. Before it can do this, it must be freed from dormitories. As long as fifteen hundred of its students live in monastic quarters provided or approved by the university, so long must the university be held responsible by the city, by parents, and by society at large, for the sanitary and moral condition of such quarters. The dormitory system implies and necessitates oversight of health and morals. The trouble to-day is that the administrative machinery in use is not capable of doing all that is and ought to be expected of it.... If it be determined openly that the health and morals of Harvard undergraduates are not to occupy the attention of the Dean and Board of the college, then the present system may be perpetuated, but if this determination is not reached, then either the system must be changed or the present attempt to accomplish the impossible will go on until something snaps."
Since Mr. Bolles's day there has been much earnest effort to solve the administrative problem; but the difficulties have increased rather than diminished. The duties of the Dean are still much the same as when the freshman class numbered one hundred instead of five. Only the Dean has been improved. He is at least five times as human and five times as earnest as any other Dean; but the freshman class keeps on growing, and when he has satisfied his very exacting conscience and retires (or, not having satisfied his conscience, perishes), no man knows where his better is to be found. Of the Secretary and the Recorder and his assistants Mr. Bolles has spoken. A Regent has among other duties a general charge of the rooms the fellows live in, and usually makes each room and its occupant a yearly visit—which the occupant, in the perversity of undergraduate nature, regards as a visitation. Then there is the physician. So large a proportion of the undergraduates were found to be isolated and unhappy in their circumstances, and remote from the knowledge of the authorities, that it became necessary to appoint some one to whom they might appeal in need. Thus the details as to each undergraduate's residence are in the hands of seven different officials, each of whom, in order to attain the best results, requires a personal acquaintance with the thousands of undergraduates. Furthermore the entire body of undergraduates changes every four years. If every administrator had the commodity of lives commonly attributed to the cat, the duties of their offices would still be infinitely beyond them.
Mr. Bolles suggested a solution of the administrative problem: "If the college is too large for its dean and administrative board to manage in the way most certain to benefit its students, it should be divided, using as a divisor the number ... which experts may agree in thinking is the number of young men whom one dean and board should be expected to know and govern effectively."
When Mr. Bolles wrote, one class of administrative officer and one only was limited in his duties to a single small community: in each building in which students lived, a proctor resided who was supposed to see that the Regent's orders were enforced. Since then another step has been taken in the same direction; a board of advisers has been established, each member of which is supposed to have a helpful care of twenty-five freshmen. These two officials, it will be seen, divide the administrative duties of an English tutor. That they represent a step toward Mr. Bolles's solution of the administrative difficulty has probably never occurred to the authorities; and as yet it must be admitted the step is mainly theoretical. The position of both, as I know from sad personal experience, is such that their duties, like those of all other administrators, resolve into a mere matter of police regulation. The men are apt to resist all friendly advances. In the end, a proctor's activities usually consist in preventing them of a Sunday from shouting too loud over games of indoor football, and at other times from blowing holes through the cornice with shotguns. The case of the freshman adviser is much the same. His first duty is to expound to his charges the mysteries of the elective system, and to help each student choose his courses. According to the original intention, he was to exert as far as possible a beneficial personal influence on newcomers; but the result seldom follows the intention. Beyond the visit which each freshman is obliged to make to his adviser in order to have his list of electives duly signed, there is nothing except misdemeanor to bring the two within the same horizon. When the adviser takes pains to proffer hospitality, the freshman's first thought is that he is to be disciplined. When, as often happens, a proctor is also a freshman adviser, he unites the two administrative duties of an English tutor; but his position is much less favorable in that his duties are performed toward two distinct bodies of men. With time, tact, and labor, he might conceivably force himself into personal relationship with his fifty-odd charges; but the inevitable ground of meeting, such as the English tutor finds in his teaching, is lacking. An attempt to become acquainted is very apt to appear gratuitous. In point of fact, such acquaintance is scarcely expected by the university, and is certainly not paid for. What little an administrator earns is apt to be so much an hour (and not so very much) for teaching. A gratuitous office is so difficult that one hesitates to perform it gratuitously. If the young instructor is bent on making himself unnecessary trouble, there is plenty of opportunity in connection with his teaching; and here, of course, owing to the characteristic lack of organic coördination, he has to deal with a body of men who, except by rare accident, are quite distinct both from those whom he advises and those whom he proctorizes. The system at Harvard may be different in detail from that at other American universities; but wherever a large body of undergraduates are living under a single administrative system, it can scarcely be different in kind.
Enough has been said to show that the only office which an administrator can perform is a police office. Where the college and the university are identical, the element of personal influence is necessarily eliminated. But if the college were divided into separate administrative units, the situation would be very different. The seven general and two special offices I have indicated might be discharged, as regards each undergraduate, by a dean and a few proctor-advisers; and as the students and their officers would be living in the same building, personal knowledge and influence might become the controlling force. The solution of the administrative problem is identical with the solution of the social and athletic problem, and in both cases a movement toward it is begun. If the student body is eventually divided into residential halls of the early mediæval type, much good will result, and probably nothing but good, even if the tutorial function proper is absent. As to the addition of the tutorial function, that is a question of extreme complexity and uncertainty, in order to grasp which it is necessary to review the peculiar educational institutions of American universities.
III