Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/574

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570
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

air and also gas and water, and all meeting-rooms will be fitted for the use of the projection lantern.

Commodious provision is made for the libraries of the various societies on the two upper floors. The entire top floor, for which the best possible illumination will be provided, is to be given over to the great library hall and its auxiliary rooms, while the floor immediately below the reading rooms will ultimately be used for book stacks. Facilities for photographic reproduction, drawing and the like are also provided.

Eight alcoves open into the large central library room, devoted to general reference books, reference periodicals, the books of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and of the American Institute of Mining Engineers and to the periodicals of each of these three societies. The union library thus arranged for should be of immense service to each of the societies represented and extremely useful to the whole engineering profession. The public will be given free access to the most important engineering library in the country.

It is expected that the building will, by the office and meeting accommodations it is designed to offer, prove an important means of advancing the interests of numerous engineering and quasi-engineering societies and indirectly of promoting the solidarity and efficiency of the scientific profession of engineering.

THE CARNEGIE FOUNDATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF TEACHING

The trustees of the Carnegie Foundation have adopted rules for granting retiring allowances which are characterized by foresight and wisdom. The question of charity has been so carefully eliminated that the plan will dignify the profession of teaching and will directly and indirectly improve the conditions in our institutions for higher education. There remain, of course, the fundamental issues between variety and uniformity, flexibility and permanence, autonomy and centralization, individualism and socialism. It can not be doubted that this great foundation favors centralization and a caste of professors. But there seems to be no other solution of the complicated problems of modern civilization than industrial socialism relieved by intellectual individuality.

The provisions for granting normal retiring allowances are as follows:

1. A normal retiring allowance is to be awarded to a professor in an accepted university, college or technical school, on the ground of either age or length of service. The term professor, as here used, is understood to include presidents, deans, and other administrative officers, professors, associate professors and assistant professors, in institutions of higher learning.

2. Retiring allowances shall be granted under the following rules, upon the application of the institution with which the professor is connected.

3. In reckoning the amount of the retiring allowance the average salary for the last five years of active service shall be considered the active pay.

4. Any person sixty-five years of age, and who has had not less than fifteen years of service as a professor, and who is at the time a professor in an accepted institution, shall be entitled to an annual retiring allowance computed as follows:

(a) For an active pay of sixteen hundred dollars or less, an allowance of one thousand dollars, provided no retiring allowance shall exceed ninety per cent, of the active pay. (b) For an active pay greater than sixteen hundred dollars the retiring allowance shall equal one thousand dollars, increased by fifty dollars for each one hundred dollars of active pay in excess of sixteen hundred dollars, (c) No retiring allowance shall exceed three thousand dollars.

5. Any person who has had a service of twenty-five years as a professor, and who is at the time a professor in an accepted institution, shall be entitled to a retiring allowance computed as follows:

(a) For an active pay of sixteen hundred dollars or less, a retiring allowance of eight hundred dollars, provided that no retiring allowance shall exceed the active pay. (b) For an active pay greater than sixteen hundred dollars, the retiring allowance shall equal eight hundred dollars, increased by forty dollars for each one hundred dollars of active pay in excess of sixteen hundred dollars, (c) For