A variant of this objection is that “college faculties can not do business.” To this it may be said parenthetically that a faculty has little opportunity except to fritter away its time, when a college president refuses to submit an agenda to it, and thus enable it to do its business in a business-like way. But every great university numbers among its faculty those who have from time to time been asked to render service to the state or to the community, and this service has been rendered in an acceptable, even a distinguished, manner. In the fields of diplomacy, finance, organized philanthropy, municipal affairs, the college professor is everywhere being requisitioned by the state as a consulting expert, or asked to render it temporary active service. Yet many of these prophets are without honor in their own country, in that no opportunity is ever given them to suggest improvements in the business administration of their own institutions, or to confer officially on educational policy with the representatives of other faculties. Thus the powers of the faculty are being atrophied through lack of use, while the college, in the midst of abundance, suffers from poverty of nourishment.
It is also urged that faculties are not interested in general educational policies, since each member is primarily concerned with his own special department. This too is a matter of conjecture until the statement has been tested by experience. It may, however, readily be granted that not all members of every faculty are interested in educational legislation. But this is true in the state, and yet it is not used as an argument either for disfranchising voters, or for refusing them the franchise. Rather, is every voter urged to do his political duty, and vote, and every alien urged to take out his naturalization papers, and as speedily as may be become a voting citizen.
The fear has also been expressed that if faculties were given increased legislative powers, the result would be confusion in the consideration of educational problems. This fear in its turn seems certainly not well grounded. It is seldom expressed with reference to the political system, yet if danger exists anywhere, it is assuredly there, and not in the college world. What education needs above everything else, is all the wisdom that can be contributed to it by the experience, intelligence, observation, and theory of every person connected with it. The result would assuredly be, not confusion, but enlightenment. A recent examination of the academic career of the members of a single college faculty, shows that they have been connected either as students or officers with nearly two hundred different institutions in this country or in Europe. This history is doubtless repeated in every other institution, showing what a wealth of academic experience and knowledge the college has never yet turned to account. It is generally believed that the great work of the trained mind is to utilize the forces of nature, and make them do its bidding, to harness fire, water, air, electricity, and to reap the advantages of the power multiplied by these means. But no effort is made to utilize the educational forces that lie dormant in a college faculty, and to multiply a hundred fold the educational forces now used. The question may at least be raised whether some fraction of the confusion found in the educational system may not be due to the failure to bring to bear upon it the clarifying power of college and university faculties. Investigation has found an outlet in every field except that of education itself.
The fear was once expressed by Edward Thring lest in any scheme for the organization of education “the skilled workman engaged in the highest kind of skilled work should be deliberately and securely put under the amateur in perpetuity.”[22] This fear is not unwarranted in its application to America. As long as college and university trustees are for the most part chosen from business interests, they naturally assume that college officers must “want something” in the way of personal advantage when they discuss the disadvantages of the present system of academic government. They do not understand that what college officers wish is not personal gain, but simply freedom of opportunity to serve the college to the limit of their powers, and that this opportunity must include a controlling voice in the educational legislation of the institutions with which they are connected, and in the formulation of the laws governing their own actions as legislating bodies. The members of college faculties seem justified in thinking that they are now deprived of all the broadening and deepening influences that come from sharing the responsibilities of the larger affairs of education. They are parts of a machine irresponsible for its final results: the planning, the direction, the thinking are all done by the administrative head. Were the duties of a college professor such as those of a letter carrier, a policeman, a snow shoveler, a brick layer, or a day laborer, it would be a simple thing to regulate his hours of work, his pay, his vacation, and his uniform. But the more complex the duties of any person, the more difficult the regulation of them by an external authority. The more serviceable any person to any organization, the more must he have freedom of thought, judgment, and action.
The further questions also arise—Does a university officer sustain the same relation to the president, or the board of trustees, that a minister does to the ministry, or that a diplomatic officer does to his government, or to the government to which he is accredited? Are college officers to be paid employees, or to be co-operators in the government of the college? If the former, then certainly military discipline must prevail. Men in high business or financial circles do not allow their employees to go about openly discussing or criticizing the way they conduct their business. But if college officers are to be co-operators in determining the educational policy of the institution with which they are connected, what is needed is not keeping them under army discipline, but the encouragement of frank discussion with them and by them of all matters pertaining to the welfare of the institution, and of education in all its largest aspects.
The situation may be confused by the custom of choosing the college president from the ranks of the clergy; the clergyman-president naturally believes that since his relations to his congregation have been those of an expert in theology to those who are ignorant of it, his relations to a college faculty must be similar. He forgets that he has to deal with those who are themselves experts, each in his own field, and that they are also presumably interested in the general field of education, and acquainted with it.
It may be that college authorities intend to encourage college faculties to discuss with them questions of educational policy; but if so, the intention has not been made with sufficient emphasis to be clearly understood. “We are clerks in a dry goods store, the dean is the floor walker and the president is the proprietor,” is the way the situation has been put by a well-known university professor. The college professor sometimes feels that while, before the law, a man is innocent until he is proved guilty, in the college world faculties are guilty until they can prove themselves innocent, and their normal attitude thus becomes one of defense against an unseen power.
The results of all this confusion between the legislative and the administrative departments in academic government are unfortunate for all concerned. Destructive criticism will always prevail, and will sap the vitality of any institution that denies to its members the right of constructive action, while external government leads to the spirit and attitude of externalism,—the members of the teaching body of a college rarely say “we,” but refer politely to the institution with which they are connected as “the college.” The impression is sometimes carried away from an educational assembly, that the profession of teaching has not attracted many brilliant college graduates. Will mediocre men continue to seek the teaching profession, while men of independence of judgment and character continue to shun a profession which offers little scope for their abilities? “What science and practical life alike need, is not narrow men, but broad men sharpened to a point,” writes President Butler, and this admirably expresses the great need in education,—a need difficult to be met as long as present conditions remain. It is a grave question whether the college professor is to continue an automaton, or to become an initial force.
The chief administrative officer of the college has come to be considered the college; in his own eyes, and in the eye of the public, he is the college; he is the only person considered competent or authorized to represent it; and it is his view that is to prevail in all matters of educational policy.
Now with the college president as an individual, the college professor has no quarrel. He often counts him among his warmest friends, and his personal relations with him are often cordial, and even intimate. But this is quite compatible with a strong and conscientious belief based on a study of facts and conditions, that the organization of the college presidency is an anomaly in a democratic state. The college professor may perhaps recognize the justice of the administration of the president per se, even when it takes such extreme form as regulations that members of a faculty are not permitted to invite anyone to speak to their classes without authorization from the president; that they cannot be absent from a class without getting permission from the president; that sudden illness, accident, or unforeseen emergency that has involved absence, must be reported; when the president gives permission to accept an invitation to lecture at another university but with the proviso that it does not involve absence from class, or that the request be not repeated during the academic year, or with the reminder that a professor’s first duty is to his own college; when it is the president who passes on the propriety of a professor’s wearing a golf suit in the lecture room, and who sometimes decides the question of wearing caps and gowns on commencement day. The objection of the college professor lies less in the nature of the rules and regulations prescribed than in the manner of the prescription. He sometimes wonders why he could not be trusted to legislate on some of these questions, and why it is so difficult for the president to realize that a professor may take an active interest in educational affairs, without having his eye on the presidency.