affairs. And all this is thoroughly compatible with a strict sense of honor and with conscientious devotion to what he believes to be the best interests of the institution. But the result is unfortunate. The executive duties of his office render the president less and less fitted as the years go by to represent the purely educational side of the institution, yet every year strengthens his control of all the interests. This condition is not in accord with business common sense.
If the proper status of the faculties is to be restored, and if the proper standard of educational efficiency is to be regained, there must be a radical change in relations of the teaching and corporate boards. In church organizations, the religious interests are ordinarily in care of one board and the secular interests in care of another; but the former, being charged with the interests for which the church was organized, is superior to the latter, although this represents the corporate body before the law. A similar grouping and relation should exist in educational organizations. The trustees should not control in any degree the internal affairs of the college or university, their duty being to relieve the teaching board from the burden of caring for business matters and to represent the institution before the state. They should fill vacancies in their number, subject to veto by, say, two thirds vote of the full professors; but the faculties should have complete control of all matters relating to the actual work of the institution and they should make all appointments to the teaching staff, subject to merely pro forma confirmation by the trustees, as representing the corporate body, or to veto by them in case there are not funds to warrant the expenditure. The office of college president, as it now exists, should be abolished; each faculty in a university or the single faculty in a college should choose its own executive head, who should be simply primus inter pares and should be the mouthpiece of his faculty in conference with other faculties or with the trustees. In a university, the several executives would be a council to determine matters affecting the policy of the institution as a whole.
Some appear to dread such reconstruction as liable to bar all progress, for it has been said that, somewhere, the most important advances have been made in face of earnest opposition by professors. Possibly. But it may be that some steps, advances in the opinion of a president, might be retrogression in the opinion of an educator. The dread, however, is unnecessary in view of the fact that the remarkable elevation of standard in legal and medical education within the last twenty years is due wholly to the professors themselves and largely, in most cases, at their expense. This statement is equally true of schools of applied science and it is well understood that in colleges the professors constantly struggle for maintenance of high standards. More than this. Professors have been known to show themselves capable of attending
