Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/271

There can be no question that American universities and' colleges are highly centralized in respect to their organization and control. The power legally is in the hands of some kind of a board of education, mostly composed of business and professional men who are in no sense organically a part of the institutional life of the university. Practically, the power centers in a president and faculty. In all matters that refer to the running of the institutional life of the place, these are autonomous bodies. They make their own laws; set their own standards; inflict their own penalties, and exercise their influence without asking anybody any questions. Their constituency, so to speak in state and church has little power. President and faculty are considerate of their constituents—sometimes tenderly so, when the budget is in excess of the available means, or when the normal percentage of increase of attendance is not attained. Otherwise these good people are expected to be silent well-wishers. Perhaps that is as it should be; at least I see no way to change it. Our chief consideration at this time, however, is that students have almost no voice in the control of the institution they attend, little feeling of responsibility for its destiny, almost no sense that their personalities are caught up into it, or that they are an organic part of its best life. The ordinary student feels himself to be an attaché, a recipient, an appendage at best, and lucky for him if he is not a sort of parasite—a foreign body, drawing vitality from the institution for a time and then going away with it. If I am right in believing that the ordinary student has a sense that he is a sort of inmate of the institution, who must obey the rules and get what he can; who does not have a stimulating sense of partnership in the place; who can talk with zest about my fraternity or our team, but who never can talk with the same warmth about our college spirit, or our curriculum, or our faculty, or our institution; if the bulk of students at the end of the four years' course have any feeling deep down that the center and core of their own wills are aloof from the deepest, warmest currents of the institutional life, then something is wrong; for the university exists solely for the student—indeed, it has no other reason for being. I fear, however, that our universities have become bulky institutions that exist chiefly for themselves—to perfect their own machinery, to preserve their own lives; they are closed systems busy with inner adjustments, rather than with the problem of how they can cultivate the soul-life of those entrusted to their care, and burning with a passion to be of service, through the students, to church, state and humanity. Our higher institutions have been developing, during recent decades, rapidly in the direction of an imperialistic attitude toward students. Professor Stratton, who first set our minds going in a lively manner in this direction, points out the anomaly existing in our political ideals and our university practises, and also the anomaly of anomalies that