The Unpopular Review is not a fitting place for the discussion of questions concerning the college, if frequent discussion means popularity: for the fashionable question in the serious periodical of the day is “What’s the matter with the colleges?” But while there is absolute agreement that something is the matter, every diagnostician has his own explanation. Athletics, the curriculum, the classics, vocational training, and every part of the educational system unable to speak for itself, have been held responsible for the existing evils. It may, however, be sufficiently unpopular for a mere college professor to say that in his humble opinion at least one thing the matter with the college is its form of government, and that here is an interesting place in which to test democracy before abandoning it as hopeless. Certainly these opinions have been so unpopular as to lead many who honestly hold them to hesitate to state them. When they are stated, it is generally by those not within the academic pale.
One of the most serious evils in the situation is that it is impossible for those most concerned to meet and discuss it openly. More than one important article has come from a college professor, but it has been anonymous because it is out of the question for him to write freely of the position in which he is placed. If he openly questions the present system, he is called “a sorehead,” “a knocker,” and “a kicker.” Every discussion of the administrative department of the university is interpreted as “an attack on the president.” To publish a doubt of the wisdom of concentrating all authority in him, is regarded as “attacking the administration.” It is at least significant that in the great work on University Control[21] the opinions of two hundred and ninety-nine members of college faculties are anonymous, while a bare half-dozen are published under the names of men holding academic positions at the time of writing. Academic freedom is usually interpreted as meaning the right of speaking freely about matters and things in general, including the trusts, anarchy, socialism, prohibition, the control of public utilities by municipal, state, or federal agencies, and kindred subjects, but never about academic organization. That freedom of expression for which Wycliffe and the Lollard movement stood in England, Luther in Germany, Calvin in France—albeit his ecclesiastical followers in this country may have wandered far from his ideas—that movement for freedom led in Europe by great university men, when it comes to discussion of educational organization has, by the irony of fate, been denied to their heirs in America to-day.
It is easy to trace the path by which monarchy in education has been reached. When education was largely controlled by the Church, students were educated by the Church, and for the Church. Educational institutions, as a part of the Church, were governed as the Church was governed. Implicit obedience was given superiors, not as educators, but as members of the Church. We have inherited from mediæval times a condition of educational organization that was the natural outgrowth of this organization, but we have perpetuated it in an age when education is controlled by the State, which has itself become democratic. The result is a tug-o’-war between the monarchical organization of education, and the democratic spirit that permeates the vast body of educators and educated.
It is also easy to see the immediate steps by which we have arrived at the present situation. The institution with which the writer is connected had fewer than two hundred regular college students when he first became a member of the faculty. It has shared in the enormous development of such institutions all over the country, and its students now number more than a thousand. Yet in all this time, the method of government has not changed. In the early days it was convenient for the president to decide every question, and this system has been continued, even though the student body has increased more than five fold, and the instructing body in the same proportion. In spite of changed conditions everywhere, this plan has been perpetuated, and has often been legalized by boards of trustees.
Thus, by both remote and immediate inheritance, education, in its organization, has arrived at absolute monarchy, with all its attending evils,—evils that affect the university as a whole and all of its separate and individual parts.
One obvious evil is the confusion everywhere found in the academic world between legislation and administration. The normal plan in a political democracy—an administrative body that carries out the wishes of the legislative body—is reversed in education. The legislative and the executive departments may be combined, and the executive made responsible to the legislative, as in England, or they may be independent, as in America; but it is only in an absolute monarchy that the administrative body both legislates and administers its own legislation. The university has thus allied itself with absolute monarchy rather than with democracy.
Another element of confusion is found in the anomalous conditions of citizenship. Educational citizenship within a faculty, attaches to the position, not to the individual. A man is appointed to a professorship in a faculty, and ipso facto he acquires full citizenship in that body, with power to vote immediately on every question submitted to it. Yet the faculty may list as “instructors” no small proportion of its members who have been connected with it many years, yet they have no share in the government of the institution. They are in a state of indeterminate probation, and are often never admitted to the privileges of full citizenship in the governing body.
Confusion also grows out of the application to the government of the university, of the unit vote long ago abandoned in the federal government. In the New England Confederation, the experiment was tried of giving equal representation to each colony, regardless of its population. This proved unsatisfactory, and subsequent plans of union attempted to square the circle by increasing the number of representatives, but giving each colony only one vote. After this in its turn proved ill-advised, the whole system was thrown overboard, and a “one man, one vote” principle adopted. In college legislation has either theory or experience shown any necessity for reverting to an antiquated political custom, and requiring that the unit rule shall prevail and each department have one vote but only one vote?
The most disturbing factor in the situation is that all questions concerning the actual government in a university are decided, not by the faculty itself, but by an external board of trustees; that this body, rather than the faculty, is ultimately and legally responsible for all legislation affecting the university; and that it transfers this responsibility to the president of the institution whom it itself appoints. If it is suggested that the faculty is the natural legislative body in an educational institution, and that this body should determine all matters of educational policy, objections are immediately interposed.
The first objection is the alleged incompetence of a faculty to legislate. But it may well be asked how often matters of genuine legislation are even submitted to it. Some years ago a university president was elected, and the special correspondent of a great metropolitan daily sent it a two-column account of his probable policy. “All over America,” he writes, “the question is being asked: ‘What are President X’s views? What is he likely to do with the elective courses? What with requirements for admission? What with the different departments of the University, re-modelling the scheme which now runs through each in a confused way? What with university extension? The compulsory chapel, and the college pastorate questions, and the complicated problems of undergraduate and general intercollegiate athletics?’” Yet every one of these questions represented as being asked “all over America” concerns not the administrative office of a university president, but the legislative department of the institution. Whether a faculty is or is not a failure as a legislative body, can be only a matter of conjecture until the experiment has had a fair trial.