XXVIWHO OWNS THE UNIVERSITIES
The marked and immediate reaction of the thinking public to the Scott Nearing case shows a growing conviction that all is not well within the conventional forms of university control. It implies a sense that universities, whether supported by the state or privately, are becoming too vitally institutions of public service to be much longer directed on the plan of a private corporation. University trustees are generally men of affairs, and as men of affairs they naturally tend to hold the same attitude towards the university that they do to the other institutions—the churches and railroads and corporations—they may direct. The university officers whom they appoint seem to have exactly the same duties of upholding the credit of the institution, of securing funds to meet its pressing needs, of organizing the administrative machinery, which their corporation officers would have. Professors are engaged bycontract as any highly-skilled superintendent would be engaged in a factory. If a well-paid subordinate of a mining corporation could not get along with his colleagues and his men, or if he consorted with the I. W. W. or made revolutionary speeches in the streets, his services would be dispensed with as readily as the Pennsylvania trustees rid themselves of the unpleasantness of Professor Nearing. Trustees may respect a professor more than they do intrinsically a fourth vice-president. They may tend to err, as Chancellor Day has suggested, on the side of “merciful consideration.” But they cannot see that the amenities of the case materially alter the professor’s status.
This would be the case of university trustees stated in its rawest terms. That they tend so often to act as if they were a mere board of directors of a private corporation gives rise to endless suspicion that they consult their own interests and the interests of the donors of the vested wealth they represent as trustees of the university, just as they would protect, as faithful corporation directors, the interests of the shareholders of the company. It is just this attitude which the thinking public is no longer inclined to tolerate. We are acquiring a newview of the place of the university in the community. When the American college was no more than an advanced boys’ academy, there may have been some excuse for this form of control by self-perpetuating and irresponsible boards of trustees. But many things have changed since Harvard and Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania and Columbia, were founded.
Now this determined autocracy may not have worked so badly when most of the trustees and practically all of the instructors were ministers of the Gospel, although even in those days faculties sometimes complained that their careful plans were overridden by men ignorant of collegiate business and little interested in educational policy. The demand that trustees’ functions should be limited to the management of funds, leaving the faculties to regulate administration and control appointments is a hoary one. But with the passing of control from the ghostly to the moneyed element, the gulf between trustee and professor has become extreme. Professors have fallen into a more and more subordinate place, and the president, who used to be their representative, has now become almost entirely the executive agent of the trustees, far removed in power and purseand public distinction from the professor. The university president in this country has become a convenient symbol for autocratic power, but even when he has become a “mayor of the palace” and professors may not approach their governors except through him, the real autocracy still lies in the external board behind him.
This absentee and amateur form of university control is being constantly ratified by our American notions of democracy, and that folkway, which runs so omnipresently through our institutional life, of giving the plain ultimate citizen control, in order that we may be protected from the tyranny of the bureaucrat. The newer state universities are controlled in exactly the same spirit. Regents, elected by legislatures, have shown themselves quite as capable as the most private trustees of representing vested political interests. Nor has democracy been achieved by the cautious admission, in recent years, of alumni trustees, as in the case of Columbia, or, as in the case of Harvard and Yale, by the substitution of alumni for the former state officials. Self-perpetuating boards will always propagate their own kind, and even if alumni trustees were ever inclined to be anything but docile, their minorityrepresentation would always be ineffective for democracy.
The issues of the modern university are not those of private property but of public welfare. Irresponsible control by a board of amateur notables is no longer adequate for the effective scientific and sociological laboratories for the community that the universities are becoming. The protests in the most recent case imply a growing realization that a professor who has a dynamic and not a purely academic interest in social movements is an asset for the whole community. The latest controversy between trustee and professors seems to have been very definitely an issue between interested policy and accurate, technical fact. It seems to have been clearly a case of old tradition against new science, the prejudiced guesses of corporation officials against the data of a scientific student of economics. Any form of university control which gives the prejudiced guess the power over the scientific research is thus a direct blow at our own social knowledge and effectiveness. The public simply cannot afford to run this risk of having the steady forging ahead of social and economic research curtailed and hampered. We cannot afford to depend wholly on the temperingof trustees by the fear of the clamor of public opinion. It is wholly undesirable that trustees should be detained only by “merciful consideration” from discharging professors whom they find uncongenial or who they feel are spreading unsound doctrine. Make university trustees directors of a private corporation and you give them the traditional right of terminating contracts with their employees without giving reasons or any form of trial. But if the university is not to be a mere degree-manufactory, or a pre-vocational school representing the narrow interests of a specialized economic class, but is to be that public intellectual and scientific service that we all want it to be, the governance must be different from that of a mining company, and the status of the professor different from that of a railroad employee. Professors should have some security of office.
An interested public which feels this way will demand that the faculties be represented strongly in the determination of all university policy and in the selection and dismissal of the instructors. It may even demand that the community itself be represented. Trustees who really envisage the modern university as a public service, as a body of scientific and sociologicalexperts, will gladly share their power. If they do not, they will demonstrate how radically their own conception of a university differs from the general one, and it will be the duty of professors to assert their rights by all those forms of collective organization whereby controlled classes from the beginning of time have made their desires effective.