Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/409

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UNIVERSITY CONTROL.
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side, because the writer is more familiar with its changes during the last thirty-five years; but the condition is serious enough for incumbents of many chairs not scientific. Men in most of the American colleges and universities are badly handicapped by routine work; not that too many hours are spent in actual teaching, but as a rule the teaching covers too many things, while too much is expected or required outside of purely college duties. The condition is unfortunate for the world, which no longer reaps the fruit of college men's work as investigators; but it is many times more unfortunate for the student. To be a thorough educator, the college instructor must possess the instinct and the experience of an investigator, otherwise he cannot train men to think. The present method of utilizing professors tends to convert them into superficial purveyors of second-hand knowledge; it must lead to decay in our educational system which has owed its virility to professors who were independent thinkers because they were thorough investigators.

The condition is serious, so serious as to inspire hope for the future. Many suggestions have been presented, most of them good but almost all of them premature. Changes more radical than any yet proposed must be made before those suggestions can be considered.

American colleges have still to contend with two fundamental difficulties—poverty and an ancient method of control.

A college professor can hardly administer the remedy for poverty, but he may suggest what is on the surface. There are too many colleges which ought to be merely academies, too many which should be high schools, too many so-called universities which ought to be modest colleges, and there are enough of true universities to supply the country 's need for a long time. Unquestionably, coalition in some cases and consolidation in others would go far toward relieving the stress; but consideration of even this matter is premature, for a radical change in the method of control must be brought about before either coalition or consolidation can become possible.

Originally, in most of our institutions, the college was the only school under control of the degree-granting corporation and the professional schools which grew up around it had but a nominal connection, managing their own affairs, both educational and financial. But the college is no longer the all-important portion of our universities; professional, technical and scientific schools, some of them in part replacing the college, predominate and all are actually, as well as nominally, under one corporate control. The college itself is not the school of thirty-five years ago; the whole system of training has been changed, and there is offered not a narrow but a broad education. Yet one finds in control' of the vast institution the same president as in the olden time, with powers like those of an academy principal and often with