THE
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
NOVEMBER, 1906
| UNIVERSITY CONTROL[1] |
By Professor J. J. STEVENSON
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
AMPLE justification for further consideration of problems connected with university control exists in the vastness of the interests concerned. The commissioner of education, in his last report, states that in the United States there are 607 colleges and universities, with almost 22,000 instructors and approximately 118,000 students; with property, real and personal, valued at $465,000,000 and an income in 1901 of $40,000,000. All recognize that the management of our colleges and universities as purely business enterprises is almost beyond reproach; but there is no such consensus of opinion respecting the administration of the trust itself, many believing that this is wasteful and inefficient, while some seem ready to assert that good faith has not been kept toward donors, many of whom had no definite conception of the work for which their money was given, but had confidence in the wisdom, integrity and qualifications of those to whom they entrusted the gifts.
The American university is a corporation managed by a board of trustees, often self-perpetuating, which, according to the state law, controls all details of management. The vast material interests have made necessary a separation of business affairs from those of educational work and control over the latter has been concentrated in the hands of a president, who gradually became director of the whole organization, determining not only its educational policy, but also, in
- ↑ Articles bearing upon this subject have appeared recently by Presidents Draper and Pritchett in the Atlantic Monthly, by Mr. J. B. Monroe and Professor Jastrow in Science, by Professor Cattell in Science and the Independent, and by Professor Stevenson in the Popular Science Monthly, all of which have been utilized in preparation of this article.
