Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/418

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
414
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

a professor who is willing and competent to stay in service. To benefit the professor, his salary should be paid for life and he should render such services as he can to advantage. The dismissal of professors on pensions throughout the country against their will may have the unfortunate effect of breaking down the permanent tenure of the professor's office, which has done more than anything else to give it dignity and to attract to it able men willing to serve for small salaries.

The act of incorporation of the Carnegie Foundation provided for two kinds of retiring allowances: (1) for long and meritorious service, and (2) for old age, disability or other sufficient reason. At the last meeting of the trustees, the retiring allowances for length of service were withdrawn, not only for the future but also retroactively from those to whom they had been promised. Dr. Pritchett, the president, states that the ground for withdrawal was that the rule worked badly: Dr. Jordan, one of the trustees, states that it was financially impossible to carry it out. Both results might have been foreseen, but neither seems to justify the foundation in breaking its engagements. The editor of the New York Evening Post does not hesitate to charge "a misty notion of the nature of moral obligations" and a violation of "the ordinary standards of honorable conduct between man and man."

The foundation supplies an additional income to a number of colleges and universities; but this appears to be the end of its usefulness. The attempt of an energetic president to lord it over the educational development of the country has done some temporary harm; but the money by which he can purchase submission will soon be exhausted. It has been a sorry sight to see institutions raising standards which they can not and should not maintain, freeing themselves nominally from denominational control—one has offered to establish an undenominational holding company—and most of

This photograph, showing a part of Harvard University in 1857 or 1858, is contributed to the Harvard Graduates' Magazine by Professor F. W. Putnam. The small square building of wood on the right of the church is the Agassiz Museum. Massachusetts Hall and Harvard Hall are shown on the right. The Agassiz Museum Building was erected in 1850. After the first section of the present Museum of Comparative Zoology was built, in 1859-60, the old Museum Building was moved to the site now occupied by the Peabody Museum. It was remodeled for living-rooms for Agassiz's students and assistants.