The professor realizes that the president is not always to be blamed for present conditions,—often he is himself the victim of a system he has had no part in creating, and forces that he cannot control apparently compel him to perpetuate it. Yet blame must be attached to him for defending it, and for refusing to discuss with his colleagues the possibility of modifying it. He seems equally remiss in not presenting the whole question of college government to the board of trustees, and pointing out to them the incongruities and anomalies of the present situation. The professor realizes that the president has a hard time of it—Does he not hear it at every educational convention?—but he always wonders if it is inevitable. He sometimes remembers an illustrated lecture given by the representative of a great manufacturing company, showing its organization and workings. One slide represented in graphic form its early organization; it was a pyramid trying to maintain stable equilibrium on its apex, and the apex was the president supporting on his shoulders the solid mass of the employees. Another slide represented the same pyramid on its base, and the apex, in its natural position, was the smiling face of the president. Underneath was the legend “It pays.” If the organization of a great business enterprise has gained in strength and stability, and has found that “it pays” in dollars and cents as well as in comfort and peace of mind, to have the responsibility for conducting it shared by all connected with it, would not a similar organization “pay” the college? As a result of recent outbreaks on Blackwell’s Island, the Commissioner of Corrections went among the inmates to learn the causes of their grievances, and with the same end in view called to the office a half-dozen of the most intelligent convicts, and invited them to state all their complaints. It is not on record that a college president or board of trustees has talked over causes of dissatisfaction with educational conditions, or has invited the members of the faculty to state their views. Is it possible that some pointers on academic government may be gained from a method employed in a modern penal institution?
It is conceivable that such a plan might also pay in dollars and cents. In one college it took nine years to get a requisition signed for a small improvement needed to relieve the officers working in the building from undue anxiety for the care of the property; and the total cost involved was six dollars. During these nine years the college treasurer was on record as saying that it cost three thousand dollars a year to enforce the compulsory attendance at chapel prescribed by the board of trustees. Would some conference between trustees, president, and faculty have resulted in a better showing on the treasurer’s books?
If the present system has entailed endless confusion in the relations between the legislative and the administrative departments of the college, it has resulted in equally anomalous conditions in the administrative department itself. Some years ago, when a gentleman distinguished in the educational field was chosen president of a university, a member of another faculty remarked, “It seems a great misfortune, does it not, that he should be made president: he has done so much for education, and now of course he will have to give up all that work.”
Nor are members of college faculties alone in thinking that the office of president is overweighted. At the time of the election of a certain university president, the alumni of the institution put themselves on record as believing “that the presidential prerogative has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.” In this opinion, probably the majority of every faculty in every college and university in the country would concur.
Many college professors are restive not only because “the presidential prerogative has increased,” but also because they are called on to expend much mental and physical energy in preserving the prerogative. The offense of lèse-majesté has become almost as criminal in the educational as in the political world. They are restive because the presidential office is overweighted, and the result as regards the administration, is to develop that most pernicious of all forms of government,—a bureaucracy. They are restive because of their inability to remedy conditions not of their own making. Some of these are financial, and a college instructor once put the matter thus: “Our president has created conditions whereby we have an annual deficit of about $20,000. This deficit is met by the chairman of the board of trustees, and the president must stand in with him. The faculty are in a hole,—they must hang on to the president, and he must hang on to the board of trustees, and they must hang on to their chairman, and trust him to pull everybody out.” Some of these conditions are educational. Wisdom seems to be attached to the office of president, rather than to the individual filling it. A man may be made president because he is known to be a good business man and an able executive officer, and ipso facto he becomes an expert on all educational questions. Progress in all educational matter must be halted while the excellent executive is familiarizing himself with the A B C of education, and perhaps in time learning how large the subject is.
Many professors are discouraged because, while the same tendency towards autocratic government has been seen in the political world, the reaction against it is already noted. The power of the speaker of the House of Representatives that gained the title of “czar” for one incumbent, has already been modified by the rules of the House. But the college professor sees nothing on the educational horizon that portends a change for the better. Every week he reads somewhere the well-known account of the first official meeting between a president of Harvard University and his faculty. When changes were proposed, and some of the faculty reasoned why these things must be, the president replied, “Because, gentlemen, you have a new president.” The professor always wonders if anything like it ever happens when a university acquires a new member of the faculty; he wonders why this vivid description of professors rubbing their eyes in amazement at the statement of their new master, should give such pleasure to the press and to the public; and he wonders if the spirit of it has not blossomed in the most recent authoritative statement of the place of the university president as it is understood by the president himself.[23]
The professor is discouraged because, although, in the present organization of the educational system, a president is considered necessary, the supply of presidents never equals the demand. So varied and numerous are the qualifications insisted upon, that when a person is found approaching the desired standard, he is sought for every vacancy. Several well-known professors have for a number of years been “mentioned” in connection with every presidency vacant, and as a society belle is said to boast of the number of desirable offers of marriage she has refused, so the professor, or more often his wife, makes known the number of presidencies that he has declined. The professor wonders why one or more of our great universities, in this age of vocational training, does not establish a training school for presidents. But this in its turn leads to the query how the supply of students in such a school could be maintained.
The professor is discouraged because of the difficulty of “getting at things.” The question of college government involves the relation of the boards of control to the president and the faculty, the relation of the president to the faculty, on the one hand, and to the student body on the other, with the result that the president becomes the official medium of communication between the governing body and the faculty. This triangular arrangement can but be productive of lack of harmony, and of constant misunderstandings; and its evils fall upon trustees, president, faculty, students, and alumni. The trustees nominally exercise an authority that is virtually given over to the president, the office of president is overweighted, the faculty are left without responsibility, as are the students in their turn, and the alumni are often in ignorance of what the policy of the college is, while everybody is exhorted to be “loyal to the college” without any clear understanding of what loyalty to the college means, or even indeed just what “the college” means. He sometimes wonders if the Duke of York’s gardener was anticipating present academic conditions in America, when he instructed his servants,
“Go, bind thou up yond dangling apricocks,