Ontogenetic Species and Other Species: PRESIDENT DAVID STARR JORDAN. Orthogenetic Variation: DR. ROBERT E. COKER. On the granting of the M.D. Degree: DR. EDWIN LINTON. The Proposed Biological Station in Greenland: M. E. HENRIKSEN.. 872 Special Articles:

The Assumed Purity of the Germ Cells in Mendelian Results: PROFESSOR T. H. MORGAN. Recent Change of Level in Alaska: PROFESSOR RALPH S. TARR, ROBERT MARTIN 877 Botanical Notes:

The American Breeders' Association; Methods in Plant Histology; Ferns of the Philippine Islands; Some Noteworthy Bulletins: PROFESSOR CHARLES E. BESSEY.... 881 Current Notes on Meteorology :-

Kite-flying over the Tropical Oceans; An Instrument for Determining True Wind Directions and Velocities at Sea; British Rainfall, 1904: PROFESSOR R. DEC. WARD. 882 Some State Census Figures for 1905: DR. JOHN FRANKLIN CROWELL...... The Museums Association of America. Scientific Notes and News....

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CLOSER RELATIONS BETWEEN TRUSTEES AND FACULTY.

I VENTURE to speak upon the topic: 'Closer Relations between Trustees and Faculty' because I am in this respect hermaphroditic. I have seen service upon both college bodies and, moreover, have studied certain problems of public school administration which present many points of analogy. I speak, however, with only that half-knowledge which we of the east, unfamiliar with state-supported universities, bring to the important questions of this conference.

It is a common cry that teachers-whether in colleges or in schools-are underpaid; and the complaint (especially if one has been a school official) seems amply justified. The imperative need of our American college faculties, however, is not higher salaries; it is larger professional authority and more genuine freedom. Those attained, the wage question will take care of itself. It is true that teaching. offers no such money prizes as does law or medicine; nevertheless, the average professor or schoolmaster is in many ways better situated than the average lawyer or physician. Despite this patent fact, the number of youth who deliberately prepare themselves to be teachers, by years of serious study, is comparatively small. Young men of power and ambition scorn what should be reckoned the noblest of professions, not because that profession

1 Delivered at the Conference of Trustees of American Colleges and Universities, at the University of Illinois, October 17, 1905.

condemns them to poverty, but because it dooms them to a sort of servitude. The American lawyer or physician is subject only to the judgment of his peers-that is, to the well-established code of his profession.

The American teacher, on the contrary, especially in the public schools, is not only subject to-he is often wholly at the mercy of unsympathetic laymen.

This condition is inherent in the American system of education, and neither can nor should be wholly abrogated. The teacher serves the public (for even an endowed college is a public institution) and must rest, therefore, under some of a servant's disabilities. Yet, without impairing the proper powers of school or college trustees, it is possible, I believe, to give teachers-or rather to restore to them -so much of authority, dignity and independence as shall raise teaching to the professional status of the law-to a position, that is, where it will commend itself to the most ambitious and the best-trained youth.

The medieval universities, as you know, were preeminently nurseries and citadels of intellectual freedom and political democracy. They were 'essentially federated republics, the government of which pertained either to the whole body of the masters or to the whole body of the students. Moreover, 'what slight subordination did exist was, in the beginning, to the ecclesiastical and, later, to the civil power.' The American universities, also, from the frontier college of Harvard, in 1636, to the latest frontier (if there now is any such place) college of the plains-have been strongholds of intellectual freedom; but in their administration they have been profoundly subordinate, in the early days to the ecclesiastical, and later-directly or indirectly to the civil power.

This subordination, under the stress of circumstances, has progressed until, as President Pritchett points out in a recent

admirable address, the American university has become an autocracy, wholly foreign in spirit and plan to our political ideals and little short of amazing to those models of thoroughgoing democracy, the German universities. And this absolutism of the American university is not, as in the days of the scholastics, an autocracy of teachers and scholars; it is an autocracy of ecclesiastical or lay trustees. Whence has arisen this astonishing inversion! Why does the very fountain of our higher life present this paradox? Mainly, I think, because the European universities grew from within, while those of this country have been established from without. The old theocracy of New England, the younger democracies of her splendid daughters, created colleges to fit youth for service in church or commonwealth, and they placed over them men of notable authority. In the east, the hands of both church and state have been largely withdrawn; but in their place have appeared the dead or living hands of donors demanding that their gifts be safeguarded by stable and substantially irremovable trustees. College and public school funds are no less sacred than they are colossal; and those who administer them assume high legal as well as moral responsibility. But this large liabil ity has been more than balanced by the gift of almost absolute powers-powers surpassing, perhaps, those of any other bodies. I do not know how it is here; but in Massachusetts the school boards are virtually despotic, far transcending in authority those sturdy democrats, their parent town meetings.

Excepting those strictly denominational, the balance of the extraordinary legal powers given to college trustees has gradually passed from the hands of the clergy into those of laymen chosen, as a rule, for their standing as financiers rather than as educators. From many aspects this has

been a salutary change; but there has followed from it one signal disadvantagethat of putting the trustees more and more out of touch with the faculties whose members they appoint. Although the reverend gentlemen of those antique college boards could scarcely have distinguished a government bond from a wildcat stock, they were usually scholars by inclination and teachers by profession, and their relations with their faculties were close and sympathetic; while the modern financier who, by skillful investing, secures every possible penny of income for his college, generally finds its educational problems quite outside his range, and sees, therefore, less and less occasion for meeting, or even knowing, that faculty over which, legally, his power is of life and death.

This change in personnel, however, is not alone responsible for the progressive alienation between trustees and faculty. That estrangement has come about, no less, through the rapid growth of college curriculums and in college attendance. When educational institutions were small and their courses of study undifferentiated, it was possible for trustees, even though not trained as teachers, to acquire an admirable education (so far as concerned their own college) through intimate relations with the faculty and personal supervision of their work. But with the enormous development in numbers and complexity, this old-fashioned contact between trustees and teachers has become impossible, and, at best, a trustee can now make himself familiar with only that department of the university which it is his duty (more honored in the breach than in the observance) to inspect. Therefore, the modern trustee has gradually withdrawn from the teaching side of the college to fix his attention upon those questions of revenue, housing and legislation which have multiplied even faster than the undergraduates.

But here again the size and complexity of the problem are appalling to men already overweighted with other responsibilities. These material questions, however, must be met and settled just as those on the educational side must be faced and solved. And both business and political experience have taught men of the world that the quickest and least troublesome way to solve administrative problems is to give as free a hand as possible to some man with brains, with tact, with power of initiative, of leadership, and of persuasion—with, in short, those peculiar abilities which distinguish the generals of our intricate twentieth century enterprises.

Hence has arisen the modern college president-a being as different from the awe-inspiring clergymen of the eighteenth century or from such men as Josiah Quincy (who was given the presidency of Harvard as a sort of haven for his declining years) as it is possible to imagine. The modern executives have had thrust upon them powers which give to their decrees the finality of an imperial ukase. They have assumed such sway, not from love of dominion, but because their task is so enormous that nothing short of practically plenary powers would permit of its being done at all. And it should be said to their honor that they have met the demands upon them as organizers and administrators so ably that, today, the leaders of the country are not, as formerly, the great statesmen and clergymen; they are these modern Cæsars-the heads of our principal colleges and universities.

These modern presidents have their cabinets in the board of trustees (if that board be small) or in an executive committee selected from it if the board be large; they have their staff in the several administrative officers, such as deans and registrars; they have their field officers in the heads of departments or courses; and the work

of the great machine, through committees, sub-committees, labor-saving devices and automatic methods of reporting, is as smooth-running (and sometimes, I fear, almost as impersonal) as a well-developed mercantile establishment. We have here a conspicuous example of the current tendency towards one-man power, towards that concentration of authority which makes, of course, for ease, rapidity and sureness of administration; but which, in politics, undermines manhood; in industrialism, destroys initiative; and in education tends to defeat the very object of teaching, which should be to develop and make the most of every man's individuality. If the goal of a college were the giving of mere instruction, nothing could be better than the present system of administration; but colleges should be fountains of true education, and the best part of education comes through the personal influence of the older governors and teachers upon adolescent, and therefore highly impressionable, youth.

Most modern colleges have expensive and excellent material plants utilized substantially to their full capacity. They possess, also, admirable executives who, as I have said, are used away beyond their limits of endurance. But those colleges have also other educational forces which are not availed of, in my opinion, to anything like their normal maximum. Those less used forces are: (1) The personal influence, as teachers and men (not as mere administrators) of the leaders of the faculty-an influence which should be exerted upon both students and trustees; (2) the personal influence, as men of power and broad human experience (not as mere moneyholders) of the trustees-an influence which should extend to students as well as faculty; and (3) the perennial and unselfish loyalty of the alumni, together with the unique experience given to those graduates in gauging their collegiate training by

the tests of life. The third force is beyond the scope of the present paper; but let it not be inferred, therefore, that I regard it as any less potent than the other two. Indeed, in the last analysis, the moral as well as the financial strength of a college must come from its own sons.

As has already been suggested, the complexity and autocracy of the American university have converted the strongest men of the faculty-the men, therefore, whose personal influence upon the students would be of the highest value-into subordinate administrators harassed with details of department maintenance and committee attendance. As a necessary result, the teaching is put largely into the hands. of recently graduated youth, zealous but not always wise, untrained in the science and art of teaching, and quite incapable, of course, of giving to their classes the inspiration which comes from contact with men of wide experience. This throws the severest strain of the college upon the weakest part, and from it arises much of our educational ineffectiveness. Mere information, lesson-hearing, examinations, become paramount; scholarship and character are well-nigh forgotten, being impossible to register by even the most elaborate machinery.

The trustees, on the other hand-excepting those who constitute the president's cabinet-find less and less opportunity for usefulness in a machine so elabcrate that any incursion into it, by those unfamiliar, may do infinite harm. Therefore most of them drift into the belief that their trust is discharged by attendance upon stated meetings and by, perhaps, an annual visit to that department which, nominally, is their especial care. Yet the personal influence upon the students of men like college trustees would be second only, in educational value, to that of the leading members of the faculty. I am not prepared to sug

gest any plan by which the trustees can be brought into direct personal relations with the students; but I firmly believe that such a plan could be devised; and I know that nothing so vivifies a man of middle life and of large responsibilities, nothing so clears his brain and rejuvenates his heart, as comradeship with bubbling and eager undergraduates.

Whether or not trustees can broaden their powers and sweeten their responsibilities by thus meeting their students directly, it is clear that they can influence them indirectly by establishing closer relations with those young men's teachers. For their pupils' sakes and for their own advantage, the professors need the stimulus and the breadth of view which they would get from looking at the world through the eyes of such a man of affairs as the usual trustee; those trustees, on the other hand, need the insight into true education and into the difficulties of training youth which they would secure from intimate contact with the members of their faculty. The money conservatism of the trustee, hesitating to grant funds for new enterprises, needs to be enlightened by the vision which the teacher has of the demands and possibilities of higher education. Per contra, the academic conservatism of the scholar needs to be quickened by the hard worldexperience of a man of more varied responsibilities. That purblind vision of the 'practical' man which exaggerates material success requires enlightenment through the opposite, but no less purblind, vision of the scholar which magnifies intellectual achievement. Each point of view is essential to the ends of true education, and unless each in authority can see and understand the other's outlook, the university will suffer and its youth will be defrauded of some of the best things in college.

At present-except for certain perfunctory visiting almost the sole point of con

tact between trustees and faculty is their common sovereign, the president, who, as I have tried to show, has administrative duties and responsibilities beyond normal powers. Moreover, however conscientious he may be, his personal equation can not but enter into his interpretations-so to speak-between two bodies of which he alone is a common factor. It is essential to his leadership that he should have large powers over the teaching staff, but the opinions of the most perfect of administrators as to the individuals under his benevolent despotism should have the salutary check of others' close and unbiased observations.

And I

In order, therefore, that there may be many instead of only one channel of understanding between trustees and faculty (as well as for the more subtle reasons suggested earlier), I would advocate most earnestly the creation in every board of trustees of a new standing committee. This committee should be most carefully chosen, and its duty should be to confer, at stated and frequent intervals, with a like standing committee of the faculty, selected freely by that body itself. would advise, further, that this conference committee be distinct, if possible, from that executive committee which I have called the president's cabinet, and that no legislation of any consequence should be passed by the executive committee or by the trustees as a whole without the concurrence of this joint committee. And-at least so far as relates to questions having any educational bearing-I would have it understood that the joint committee should not concur until the proposed action had been submitted to the faculty as a whole, had been debated, if so desired, before the standing committee and the executive committee sitting in joint session, and had been approved by at least a majority of the teaching staff.