It is a truism that since the day of Plato’sRepublicno subject has had such widespread discussion as has that of the proper form of government. It is equally a truism that if imitation is the sincerest flattery, the hundreds of written constitutions that have sprung up since 1789 attest the belief that America has successfully put into practical form the theories of democracy. Yet a minority has always questioned whether democracy is after all the panacea for political evils, and recent writers like Mr. Lecky, have but given expression to a somewhat widespread feeling of uncertainty as to the permanent success of democratic institutions.
It is noteworthy, however, that the discussion of democracy has been confined to the field of politics, and that its adaptation to educational institutions, where presumably a high grade of intelligence, education, opportunity and experience seem to offer the greatest promise of success, is never publicly discussed, much less in this country practiced.[20]
It is equally anomalous that in Europe, with its tendency to monarchy in the state, there is found absolute democracy in the government of educational institutions, while America, democratic in the state, furnishes themost extreme illustration of absolute monarchy in the government of its educational institutions. It seems, if possible, even more strange that American college students have for years been going to European universities, and yet apparently have paid no attention to questions of educational organization. It can only be explained by the general lack of information and interest in the management of educational institutions.
TheUnpopular Reviewis not a fitting place for the discussion of questions concerning the college, if frequent discussion means popularity: for the fashionable question in the serious periodical of the day is “What’s the matter with the colleges?” But while there is absolute agreement thatsomethingis the matter, every diagnostician has his own explanation. Athletics, the curriculum, the classics, vocational training, and every part of the educational system unable to speak for itself, have been held responsible for the existing evils. It may, however, be sufficiently unpopular for a mere college professor to say that in his humble opinion at least one thing the matter with the college is its form of government, and that here is an interesting place in which to test democracy before abandoning it as hopeless. Certainly these opinions have been so unpopular as to lead many who honestly hold them to hesitate to state them. When they are stated, it is generally by those not within the academic pale.
One of the most serious evils in the situation is that it is impossible for those most concerned to meet and discuss it openly. More than one important article has come from a college professor, but it has been anonymous because it is out of the question for him to write freely of the position in which he is placed. If he openly questions the present system, he is called “a sorehead,” “a knocker,” and “a kicker.” Every discussion of the administrative department of the university is interpreted as “an attack on the president.” To publish a doubt of the wisdom of concentrating all authority in him, is regarded as“attacking the administration.” It is at least significant that in the great work onUniversity Control[21]the opinions of two hundred and ninety-nine members of college faculties are anonymous, while a bare half-dozen are published under the names of men holding academic positions at the time of writing. Academic freedom is usually interpreted as meaning the right of speaking freely about matters and things in general, including the trusts, anarchy, socialism, prohibition, the control of public utilities by municipal, state, or federal agencies, and kindred subjects, but never about academic organization. That freedom of expression for which Wycliffe and the Lollard movement stood in England, Luther in Germany, Calvin in France—albeit his ecclesiastical followers in this country may have wandered far from his ideas—that movement for freedom led in Europe by great university men, when it comes to discussion of educational organization has, by the irony of fate, been denied to their heirs in America to-day.
It is easy to trace the path by which monarchy in education has been reached. When education was largely controlled by the Church, students were educated by the Church, and for the Church. Educational institutions, as a part of the Church, were governed as the Church was governed. Implicit obedience was given superiors, not as educators, but as members of the Church. We have inherited from mediæval times a condition of educational organization that was the natural outgrowth of this organization, but we have perpetuated it in an age when education is controlled by the State, which has itself become democratic. The result is a tug-o’-war between the monarchical organization of education, and the democratic spirit that permeates the vast body of educators and educated.
It is also easy to see the immediate steps by which we have arrived at the present situation. The institution with which the writer is connected had fewer than twohundred regular college students when he first became a member of the faculty. It has shared in the enormous development of such institutions all over the country, and its students now number more than a thousand. Yet in all this time, the method of government has not changed. In the early days it was convenient for the president to decide every question, and this system has been continued, even though the student body has increased more than five fold, and the instructing body in the same proportion. In spite of changed conditions everywhere, this plan has been perpetuated, and has often been legalized by boards of trustees.
Thus, by both remote and immediate inheritance, education, in its organization, has arrived at absolute monarchy, with all its attending evils,—evils that affect the university as a whole and all of its separate and individual parts.
One obvious evil is the confusion everywhere found in the academic world between legislation and administration. The normal plan in a political democracy—an administrative body that carries out the wishes of the legislative body—is reversed in education. The legislative and the executive departments may be combined, and the executive made responsible to the legislative, as in England, or they may be independent, as in America; but it is only in an absolute monarchy that the administrative body both legislates and administers its own legislation. The university has thus allied itself with absolute monarchy rather than with democracy.
Another element of confusion is found in the anomalous conditions of citizenship. Educational citizenship within a faculty, attaches to the position, not to the individual. A man is appointed to a professorship in a faculty, andipso factohe acquires full citizenship in that body, with power to vote immediately on every question submitted to it. Yet the faculty may list as “instructors” no small proportion of its members who have been connected withit many years, yet they have no share in the government of the institution. They are in a state of indeterminate probation, and are often never admitted to the privileges of full citizenship in the governing body.
Confusion also grows out of the application to the government of the university, of the unit vote long ago abandoned in the federal government. In the New England Confederation, the experiment was tried of giving equal representation to each colony, regardless of its population. This proved unsatisfactory, and subsequent plans of union attempted to square the circle by increasing the number of representatives, but giving each colony only one vote. After this in its turn proved ill-advised, the whole system was thrown overboard, and a “one man, one vote” principle adopted. In college legislation has either theory or experience shown any necessity for reverting to an antiquated political custom, and requiring that the unit rule shall prevail and each department have one vote but only one vote?
The most disturbing factor in the situation is that all questions concerning the actual government in a university are decided, not by the faculty itself, but by an external board of trustees; that this body, rather than the faculty, is ultimately and legally responsible for all legislation affecting the university; and that it transfers this responsibility to the president of the institution whom it itself appoints. If it is suggested that the faculty is the natural legislative body in an educational institution, and that this body should determine all matters of educational policy, objections are immediately interposed.
The first objection is the alleged incompetence of a faculty to legislate. But it may well be asked how often matters of genuine legislation are even submitted to it. Some years ago a university president was elected, and the special correspondent of a great metropolitan daily sent it a two-column account of his probable policy. “All over America,” he writes, “the question is being asked: ‘Whatare President X’s views? What is he likely to do with the elective courses? What with requirements for admission? What with the different departments of the University, re-modelling the scheme which now runs through each in a confused way? What with university extension? The compulsory chapel, and the college pastorate questions, and the complicated problems of undergraduate and general intercollegiate athletics?’” Yet every one of these questions represented as being asked “all over America” concerns not the administrative office of a university president, but the legislative department of the institution. Whether a faculty is or is not a failure as a legislative body, can be only a matter of conjecture until the experiment has had a fair trial.
A variant of this objection is that “college faculties can not do business.” To this it may be said parenthetically that a faculty has little opportunity except to fritter away its time, when a college president refuses to submit an agenda to it, and thus enable it to do its business in a business-like way. But every great university numbers among its faculty those who have from time to time been asked to render service to the state or to the community, and this service has been rendered in an acceptable, even a distinguished, manner. In the fields of diplomacy, finance, organized philanthropy, municipal affairs, the college professor is everywhere being requisitioned by the state as a consulting expert, or asked to render it temporary active service. Yet many of these prophets are without honor in their own country, in that no opportunity is ever given them to suggest improvements in the business administration of their own institutions, or to confer officially on educational policy with the representatives of other faculties. Thus the powers of the faculty are being atrophied through lack of use, while the college, in the midst of abundance, suffers from poverty of nourishment.
It is also urged that faculties are not interested in generaleducational policies, since each member is primarily concerned with his own special department. This too is a matter of conjecture until the statement has been tested by experience. It may, however, readily be granted that not all members of every faculty are interested in educational legislation. But this is true in the state, and yet it is not used as an argument either for disfranchising voters, or for refusing them the franchise. Rather, is every voter urged to do his political duty, and vote, and every alien urged to take out his naturalization papers, and as speedily as may be become a voting citizen.
The fear has also been expressed that if faculties were given increased legislative powers, the result would be confusion in the consideration of educational problems. This fear in its turn seems certainly not well grounded. It is seldom expressed with reference to the political system, yet if danger exists anywhere, it is assuredly there, and not in the college world. What education needs above everything else, is all the wisdom that can be contributed to it by the experience, intelligence, observation, and theory of every person connected with it. The result would assuredly be, not confusion, but enlightenment. A recent examination of the academic career of the members of a single college faculty, shows that they have been connected either as students or officers with nearly two hundred different institutions in this country or in Europe. This history is doubtless repeated in every other institution, showing what a wealth of academic experience and knowledge the college has never yet turned to account. It is generally believed that the great work of the trained mind is to utilize the forces of nature, and make them do its bidding, to harness fire, water, air, electricity, and to reap the advantages of the power multiplied by these means. But no effort is made to utilize the educational forces that lie dormant in a college faculty, and to multiply a hundred fold the educational forces now used. The question may at least be raised whether some fraction ofthe confusion found in the educational system may not be due to the failure to bring to bear upon it the clarifying power of college and university faculties. Investigation has found an outlet in every field except that of education itself.
The fear was once expressed by Edward Thring lest in any scheme for the organization of education “the skilled workman engaged in the highest kind of skilled work should be deliberately and securely put under the amateur in perpetuity.”[22]This fear is not unwarranted in its application to America. As long as college and university trustees are for the most part chosen from business interests, they naturally assume that college officers must “want something” in the way of personal advantage when they discuss the disadvantages of the present system of academic government. They do not understand that what college officers wish is not personal gain, but simply freedom of opportunity to serve the college to the limit of their powers, and that this opportunity must include a controlling voice in the educational legislation of the institutions with which they are connected, and in the formulation of the laws governing their own actions as legislating bodies. The members of college faculties seem justified in thinking that they are now deprived of all the broadening and deepening influences that come from sharing the responsibilities of the larger affairs of education. They are parts of a machine irresponsible for its final results: the planning, the direction, the thinking are all done by the administrative head. Were the duties of a college professor such as those of a letter carrier, a policeman, a snow shoveler, a brick layer, or a day laborer, it would be a simple thing to regulate his hours of work, his pay, his vacation, and his uniform. But the more complex the duties of any person, the more difficult the regulation of them by an external authority. The more serviceableany person to any organization, the more must he have freedom of thought, judgment, and action.
The further questions also arise—Does a university officer sustain the same relation to the president, or the board of trustees, that a minister does to the ministry, or that a diplomatic officer does to his government, or to the government to which he is accredited? Are college officers to be paid employees, or to be co-operators in the government of the college? If the former, then certainly military discipline must prevail. Men in high business or financial circles do not allow their employees to go about openly discussing or criticizing the way they conduct their business. But if college officers are to be co-operators in determining the educational policy of the institution with which they are connected, what is needed is not keeping them under army discipline, but the encouragement of frank discussion with them and by them of all matters pertaining to the welfare of the institution, and of education in all its largest aspects.
The situation may be confused by the custom of choosing the college president from the ranks of the clergy; the clergyman-president naturally believes that since his relations to his congregation have been those of an expert in theology to those who are ignorant of it, his relations to a college faculty must be similar. He forgets that he has to deal with those who are themselves experts, each in his own field, and that they are also presumably interested in the general field of education, and acquainted with it.
It may be that college authorities intend to encourage college faculties to discuss with them questions of educational policy; but if so, the intention has not been made with sufficient emphasis to be clearly understood. “We are clerks in a dry goods store, the dean is the floor walker and the president is the proprietor,” is the way the situation has been put by a well-known university professor. The college professor sometimes feels that while, before the law, a man is innocent until he is proved guilty, in the collegeworld faculties are guilty until they can prove themselves innocent, and their normal attitude thus becomes one of defense against an unseen power.
The results of all this confusion between the legislative and the administrative departments in academic government are unfortunate for all concerned. Destructive criticism will always prevail, and will sap the vitality of any institution that denies to its members the right of constructive action, while external government leads to the spirit and attitude of externalism,—the members of the teaching body of a college rarely say “we,” but refer politely to the institution with which they are connected as “the college.” The impression is sometimes carried away from an educational assembly, that the profession of teaching has not attracted many brilliant college graduates. Will mediocre men continue to seek the teaching profession, while men of independence of judgment and character continue to shun a profession which offers little scope for their abilities? “What science and practical life alike need, is not narrow men, but broad men sharpened to a point,” writes President Butler, and this admirably expresses the great need in education,—a need difficult to be met as long as present conditions remain. It is a grave question whether the college professor is to continue an automaton, or to become an initial force.
The chief administrative officer of the college has come to be considered the college; in his own eyes, and in the eye of the public, heisthe college; he is the only person considered competent or authorized to represent it; and it is his view that is to prevail in all matters of educational policy.
Now with the college president as an individual, the college professor has no quarrel. He often counts him among his warmest friends, and his personal relations with him are often cordial, and even intimate. But this is quite compatible with a strong and conscientious belief based on a study of facts and conditions, that the organizationof the college presidency is an anomaly in a democratic state. The college professor may perhaps recognize the justice of the administration of the presidentper se, even when it takes such extreme form as regulations that members of a faculty are not permitted to invite anyone to speak to their classes without authorization from the president; that they cannot be absent from a class without getting permission from the president; that sudden illness, accident, or unforeseen emergency that has involved absence, must be reported; when the president gives permission to accept an invitation to lecture at another university but with the proviso that it does not involve absence from class, or that the request be not repeated during the academic year, or with the reminder that a professor’s first duty is to his own college; when it is the president who passes on the propriety of a professor’s wearing a golf suit in the lecture room, and who sometimes decides the question of wearing caps and gowns on commencement day. The objection of the college professor lies less in the nature of the rules and regulations prescribed than in the manner of the prescription. He sometimes wonders why he could not be trusted to legislate on some of these questions, and why it is so difficult for the president to realize that a professor may take an active interest in educational affairs, without having his eye on the presidency.
The professor realizes that the president is not always to be blamed for present conditions,—often he is himself the victim of a system he has had no part in creating, and forces that he cannot control apparently compel him to perpetuate it. Yet blame must be attached to him for defending it, and for refusing to discuss with his colleagues the possibility of modifying it. He seems equally remiss in not presenting the whole question of college government to the board of trustees, and pointing out to them the incongruities and anomalies of the present situation. The professor realizes that the president has a hard time of it—Does he not hear it at every educational convention?—buthe always wonders if it is inevitable. He sometimes remembers an illustrated lecture given by the representative of a great manufacturing company, showing its organization and workings. One slide represented in graphic form its early organization; it was a pyramid trying to maintain stable equilibrium on its apex, and the apex was the president supporting on his shoulders the solid mass of the employees. Another slide represented the same pyramid on its base, and the apex, in its natural position, was the smiling face of the president. Underneath was the legend “It pays.” If the organization of a great business enterprise has gained in strength and stability, and has found that “it pays” in dollars and cents as well as in comfort and peace of mind, to have the responsibility for conducting it shared by all connected with it, would not a similar organization “pay” the college? As a result of recent outbreaks on Blackwell’s Island, the Commissioner of Corrections went among the inmates to learn the causes of their grievances, and with the same end in view called to the office a half-dozen of the most intelligent convicts, and invited them to state all their complaints. It is not on record that a college president or board of trustees has talked over causes of dissatisfaction with educational conditions, or has invited the members of the faculty to state their views. Is it possible that some pointers on academic government may be gained from a method employed in a modern penal institution?
It is conceivable that such a plan might also pay in dollars and cents. In one college it took nine years to get a requisition signed for a small improvement needed to relieve the officers working in the building from undue anxiety for the care of the property; and the total cost involved was six dollars. During these nine years the college treasurer was on record as saying that it cost three thousand dollars a year to enforce the compulsory attendance at chapel prescribed by the board of trustees. Would some conference between trustees, president, andfaculty have resulted in a better showing on the treasurer’s books?
If the present system has entailed endless confusion in the relations between the legislative and the administrative departments of the college, it has resulted in equally anomalous conditions in the administrative department itself. Some years ago, when a gentleman distinguished in the educational field was chosen president of a university, a member of another faculty remarked, “It seems a great misfortune, does it not, that he should be made president: he has done so much for education, and now of course he will have to give up all that work.”
Nor are members of college faculties alone in thinking that the office of president is overweighted. At the time of the election of a certain university president, the alumni of the institution put themselves on record as believing “that the presidential prerogative has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.” In this opinion, probably the majority of every faculty in every college and university in the country would concur.
Many college professors are restive not only because “the presidential prerogative has increased,” but also because they are called on to expend much mental and physical energy in preserving the prerogative. The offense oflèse-majestéhas become almost as criminal in the educational as in the political world. They are restive because the presidential office is overweighted, and the result as regards the administration, is to develop that most pernicious of all forms of government,—a bureaucracy. They are restive because of their inability to remedy conditions not of their own making. Some of these are financial, and a college instructor once put the matter thus: “Our president has created conditions whereby we have an annual deficit of about $20,000. This deficit is met by the chairman of the board of trustees, and the president must stand in with him. The faculty are in a hole,—they must hang on to the president, and he musthang on to the board of trustees, and they must hang on to their chairman, and trust him to pull everybody out.” Some of these conditions are educational. Wisdom seems to be attached to the office of president, rather than to the individual filling it. A man may be made president because he is known to be a good business man and an able executive officer, andipso factohe becomes an expert on all educational questions. Progress in all educational matter must be halted while the excellent executive is familiarizing himself with the A B C of education, and perhaps in time learning how large the subject is.
Many professors are discouraged because, while the same tendency towards autocratic government has been seen in the political world, the reaction against it is already noted. The power of the speaker of the House of Representatives that gained the title of “czar” for one incumbent, has already been modified by the rules of the House. But the college professor sees nothing on the educational horizon that portends a change for the better. Every week he reads somewhere the well-known account of the first official meeting between a president of Harvard University and his faculty. When changes were proposed, and some of the faculty reasoned why these things must be, the president replied, “Because, gentlemen, you have a new president.” The professor always wonders if anything like it ever happens when a university acquires a new member of the faculty; he wonders why this vivid description of professors rubbing their eyes in amazement at the statement of their new master, should give such pleasure to the press and to the public; and he wonders if the spirit of it has not blossomed in the most recent authoritative statement of the place of the university president as it is understood by the president himself.[23]
The professor is discouraged because, although, in the present organization of the educational system, a presidentis considered necessary, the supply of presidents never equals the demand. So varied and numerous are the qualifications insisted upon, that when a person is found approaching the desired standard, he is sought for every vacancy. Several well-known professors have for a number of years been “mentioned” in connection with every presidency vacant, and as a society belle is said to boast of the number of desirable offers of marriage she has refused, so the professor, or more often his wife, makes known the number of presidencies that he has declined. The professor wonders why one or more of our great universities, in this age of vocational training, does not establish a training school for presidents. But this in its turn leads to the query how the supply of students in such a school could be maintained.
The professor is discouraged because of the difficulty of “getting at things.” The question of college government involves the relation of the boards of control to the president and the faculty, the relation of the president to the faculty, on the one hand, and to the student body on the other, with the result that the president becomes the official medium of communication between the governing body and the faculty. This triangular arrangement can but be productive of lack of harmony, and of constant misunderstandings; and its evils fall upon trustees, president, faculty, students, and alumni. The trustees nominally exercise an authority that is virtually given over to the president, the office of president is overweighted, the faculty are left without responsibility, as are the students in their turn, and the alumni are often in ignorance of what the policy of the college is, while everybody is exhorted to be “loyal to the college” without any clear understanding of what loyalty to the college means, or even indeed just what “the college” means. He sometimes wonders if the Duke of York’s gardener was anticipating present academic conditions in America, when he instructed his servants,
“Go, bind thou up yond dangling apricocks,Which, like unruly children, make their sireStoop with oppression of their prodigal weight;Give some supportance to the bending twigs.Go thou, and like an executionerCut off the heads of too-fast growing sprays,That look too lofty in our commonwealth;All must be even in our government.”
“Go, bind thou up yond dangling apricocks,Which, like unruly children, make their sireStoop with oppression of their prodigal weight;Give some supportance to the bending twigs.Go thou, and like an executionerCut off the heads of too-fast growing sprays,That look too lofty in our commonwealth;All must be even in our government.”
“Go, bind thou up yond dangling apricocks,Which, like unruly children, make their sireStoop with oppression of their prodigal weight;Give some supportance to the bending twigs.Go thou, and like an executionerCut off the heads of too-fast growing sprays,That look too lofty in our commonwealth;All must be even in our government.”
“Go, bind thou up yond dangling apricocks,
Which, like unruly children, make their sire
Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight;
Give some supportance to the bending twigs.
Go thou, and like an executioner
Cut off the heads of too-fast growing sprays,
That look too lofty in our commonwealth;
All must be even in our government.”
Yet after all ’tis a good world, my masters! The professor is not wholly downcast. If he does not know by name, without consulting the catalogue, a third of the members of the board of trustees that controls his academic destiny; if he does not know by sight a fourth of them, and if he has never exchanged comments on the weather with more than a fifth of them, he at least hopes that the sixth of the board who may chance, through the college catalogue, to know of his connection with the institution, may not feel unkindly toward him. He can only plead in extenuation of his rashness in suggesting a more democratic form of academic government, his strong conviction that only asallparts of the educational structure are strengthened, can the structure approach perfection, and serve the end for which it has been erected.