Germany reverses the inconsistency, being politically imperialistic, but educationally democratic. Speaking of our own nation he says:
Among a people so jealous of private rights, university governments have assumed a form that we might have expected to see in a land of kings. European universities have a constitution that might have come from some American theorist. American universities are as though founded and fostered in the bourne of aristocracy. Europe and America are each harboring what would seem properly sacred only to the other.
There are four or five causes that have brought about too great a centralization of authority in the hands of president and faculty, and along with it a cleavage of interest of faculty and student body until they stand off from one another in a relationship that is not wholesome for either.
1. In the first place, a historic strain of autocracy has come down from the old-fashioned schoolmaster. In the early days of America, the schoolmaster, with rod and rule if need be, usually a man—not a lad of eighteen or a woman or much less a frail girl—was a monarch in his realm. He was built, and for a reason, on the lines of a sturdy, stern Anglo-Saxon father. He has left us as a heritage his custom and conception of imperialistic authority in education along with his ineffaceable three "r's." The secondary schools were differentiated from the common schools. The "head master" developed out of the parent stem, the schoolmaster, under the rule that like produces like. He was well named, for he was expected to be superior in wisdom and masterful in bearing. The college is a specialization of the old academy and high school, and has inherited from these many of its ideas about curriculum, form of organization and centralized authority.
2. In the second place, as Professor Stratton has pointed out, our higher institutions have received a strain from the form of government of the early colonies. These were under the rule of the mother country, which rule was effected through a corporation, or a governor, or both. They were never elected by the colonists nor selected from among their number, but superimposed on them from the mother country. Our boards of education are descendants of the early corporations, and the university presidents are built after the pattern of the early governors.
In imperialistic Europe the democratic life of the faculty and the university generally, on the contrary, is the direct historical consequent of the old guilds that were established around the idea of equality, fraternity and mutual helpfulness.
3. In the third place, the higher institutions have reaped the blessings and also the ills of the naive democracy in which each individual is turned loose to do as he pleases, and, being human, chooses to be unduly self regardful. There are many indications that the earlier colleges, established by people whose passion was for equal opportunity,
