incompetency," "demoralization," "discourtesy," "lack of discipline," and "laziness"—if this term properly translates the statements that "no original work worthy of note has been done by the members of the faculty," and that "the professors are practically unknown to the literature of their respective subjects, even after long years of identification with their respective departments of instruction." Truly the members of university faculties may set forth not only the private tables of university presidents, but also the extension dining tables of boards of trustees.
The near-professor recalled that he had once read the story of a conversation between Browning and a Jewish friend in which the latter had sought an explanation for the repugnance often inspired by some of his race and found it, he thought, in the difference in appearance and manner between the Jews and the Christians of a certain class. Browning replied:
Naturally their characteristics would become more intensified through long exclusion from other groups of men; their manners would be unlike those of others with whom they were not allowed to mix. No wonder if, hedged in as they were, those peculiarities took offensive shapes. Does not every development, to become normal, require space? Why, our very foot, if you restrict it and hedge it in, throws out a corn in self-defense!
Still another reason assigned is that it is not the business of the faculty. "The business of university faculties is teaching. It is not legislation and it is not administration," is the emphatic statement of one president. "The special office of the faculty is to teach," states a second president. "The duties of a professor are investigation and instruction," adds a third. No statement seems to be so generally endorsed by college presidents as that "it is the business of teachers to teach."
It is altogether probable that college professors would agree that their chief, if not their only, raison d'être is teaching, if the term teaching is made elastic enough to cover the time and opportunity needed to pursue knowledge. For how can the blind lead the blind, how can we make bricks without straw, are the ever iterated and re-iterated cries of those weighed down with the burdens of daily teaching, of those who have no opportunity themselves of drinking at the Pierian spring, yet must hold the cup to the lips of others. "Our function in the educational system is indeed teaching," they may well say, "but we must ourselves seek and find knowledge if we are to pass it on to others."
But who shall define the limits of teaching, or prescribe the boundaries of the educational field, or determine the nature of those questions that are "purely professional," or set now on this side and then on that the subjects that concern special departments and those that concern education in general? Teaching and new buildings, teaching and improved equipment, teaching and additional instructors, teaching and
