and common observation proves to us that it must concern an actual situation, to be of any real worth. If it involves special knowledge, it must be by men who have the knowledge or who will respect the opinions of others who have it.

Trustees, as the representatives of the founders or donors, or of the state, are practically, if not altogether, unknown to foreign universities. Those universities are managed directly by the government, or by the faculties, or by both. The introduction of trustee management into American universities has resulted necessarily from their more democratic character, from their different manner of support, from their independence of government, and from the difference between the political systems and popular purposes in the New World and the Old. With the early development of American universities it was obvious enough that they could not be left to the management of political officers; that they must be managed without partisanship and governed by law rather than supervised by legislatures; and as they have taken shape, it has been equally clear that the appointment of teachers and the assignment of resources to departments could not be left to the faculties. The special circumstances of the universities, and the practically uniform plan of corporate management in America, developed the board of trustees in our universities, with functions and powers subordinate to and consistent with, and exercised in a similar manner with, those which are held by the sovereign legislative authority over all corporations. Trustees stand for the legislature so far as the law permits.

The trustees of a university are charged by law, either statutory or judge-made, or by widely acknowledged usage, with that general oversight and that legislative direction which will assure the true execution of a trust. They are to secure revenues and control expenditures. They are to prevent waste and assure results. They are never to forget that they represent the people who created and who maintain the university. They are not to represent these people as a tombstone might, but as living men may. The are to do the things their principals would assuredly do if in their places, to enlarge the advantage to the cestui que trust. This is a heavy burden. It must be assumed

that it is given to picked men who are specially able to bear it; who would not give their time to it for mere money compensation, but are happy in doing it for the sake of promoting the best and noblest things.

The trustees do not live upon the campus, and they are not assumed to be professional educationalists. Their judgment is likely to be quite as good as to the relations of the work to the public interests, and as to what the institution should do to fulfill its mission, as that of any expert would be. To get done what they want done, they must enact directions and appoint competent agents. The individual trustee has no power of supervision or direction not given to

him by the recorded action of the board. What they do is to be done in session, after the modification of individual opinions through joint. and formal discussion. It must be reduced to exact form and stand in a permanent record. Trustees make a mess of it when they usurp executive functions, and they sow dragons' teeth when they intrigue with a teacher or hunt a job for a patriot who thinks he is in need of it. The are bound to regard expert opinion and to appoint agents who can render a more expert service than any others who can be procured. They are to keep the experts sane, on the earth, in touch with the world, as it were. They are to sustain agents and help them to succeed, and they are to remove agents who are not successful. From a point of view remote enough and high enough, they are to inspect the whole field. They are bound to be familiar with all that the institution is doing. The are to be alert in keeping the whole organization free from whatever may corrupt, and up to the very top notch of efficient public service. There is too much money involved to permit of idle experimentation, too high interests at stake to allow of vacillation and uncertainty. Under a responsibility that is unceasing and unrelenting they must learn the truth and never hestitate to act upon it. And they must find their abundant reward, not in any material return to themselves, but in the splendid fact that the great aggregation of land and structure and equipment, of great teachers and aspiring students, of sacred memories and precious hopes and potential possibilities, is doing the work of God and man in the most perfect way and in the largest measure which their knowledge and experience, their entire freedom, and their combined wisdom and forecfulness can devise.

The business of university faculties is teaching. It is not legislation and it is not administration, certainly not beyond the absolute necessities. There is just complaint because the necessities of administration take much time from teaching. It lessens the most expert and essential work which the world is doing. It seldom enlarges opportunity or enhances reputation. It is true that teachers have great fun legislating, but it is not quite certain that, ouside of their specialties, they will ever come to conclusions, or that if they do, their conclusions will stand. The main advantage of it is the relaxation and intellectual dissipation they get out of it. That is great. And, in a way, it may be as necessary as it is great. Of course teachers could not endure it if they were always to conduct themselves out of the classroom as most of them seem to think they are obliged to do in it. Perhaps others would also have difficulty in enduring it. They are given to disorderliness and argumentation beyond any other class who stand so thoroughly for doing things in regular order. It is not strange. It is the inevitable reaction,-what some of them would call the psychological antithesis, I suppose. Nor is it to be repressed

or regretted, for it adds to the effectiveness and attractiveness of the most effective and attractive people in the world. All this is often particularly true of the past masters in the art. No wonder that Professor North, who taught Greek for sixty years at Hamilton College,-"Old Greek," as many generations of students fondly called him,—wrote in his diary that it would have to be cut in the granite of his tombstone that he "died of faculty meetings," for he was sure that some day he would drop off before one would come to an end.

But the needs of the profession ought to be met by directing the surplus of physical and intellectual energy into really useful and potential channels, such as sports, or battling over academic questions with the doughty warriors of other universities.

ness.

Speaking seriously, university policies are not to be settled by a majority vote. They are to be determined by expert opinion. The very fact of extreme expertness in one direction is as likely not to imply lack of it in other directions. Experts are no more successful than other people in settling things outside of their zone of expertWithin that they are to have their own way so long as they sustain themselves and the money holds out. But the resources are not to be equally divided for mere convenience. University rivalries are not to be adjusted by treaties between the rivals. More of university success depends upon keeping unimportant things from being done in a mistaken way than upon developing useful policies and pursuing them in the correct way. Men and work are to be weighed, not counted. Department experts are to determine department policies, college experts college policies, and university experts university policies.

What the President of the United States is to the Federal Congress, the president of the university is to the board of trustees. It has not long been so, because American universities are recent creations. When colleges were small, when the care of their property was no task, when all of a college were of one sect, and theology was the main if not the only purpose, when there was but one course of study and the instruction was bookish and catechetical, administration was no problem at all. There was nothing to put a strain on the ship. Even though there was no specific responsibility and no delegation of special functions, with immediate accountability, possessions did not go to waste, frauds did not creep in, and injustice and paralysis did not enIt may easily be so now in the smaller colleges; it cannot be so in the great universities. The attendance of thousands of students, the enlargement of wealth and of the number of students who go to college without any very definite aim, the admission of women, the more luxurious and complex life, the greater need of just and forceful guidance of students, the multiplication of departments, the substitution of the laboratory for the book, the new and numberless pro

sue.

cesses, the care of millions of property and the handling of very large amounts of money, and the continual and complete meeting of all the responsibilities which this great aggregation of materials and of moral and industrial powers owes to the public, have slowly, but logically and as a matter of course, developed the modern university presidency. It is the centralized and responsible headship of a balanced administrative organization, with specialized functions running out to all of the great innumerable cares and activities of the great institution. It is the essential office which holds the right of leadership, which has the responsibility of initiative, which is chargeable with full information and held to be endowed with sound discretion, which may act decisively and immediately to conserve every interest and promote every purpose for which the university was established.

It may be well to specify and illustrate. Conditions are not wholly ideal in a university. Men and women not altogether ripe for translation have to be dealt with. Real conditions, often unprecedented, have to be met. Not only effectiveness within, but decent and helpful relations with neighbors, constituents, and the world, are to be assured. Some authority must be able to do things at once, and some word must often be spoken to or for the university community. When spoken, it must be a free word, uttered out of an ample right to speak.

An America university may be possessed of property worth from three to fifty millions of dollars. This is in lands and buildings and appliances and securities. These things may be legislated about, but that alone is not caring for them. To keep them from spoilation and to make the most of them, there must be expert care through a competent department, but in harmonious relations with an ever-present power which has the right and responsibliity of declaring and doing things.

The very life of the institution depends upon eliminating weak and unproductive tachers and reinforcing the teaching body with the very best in the world. Unless there is a scientific aggressiveness in the search of new knowledge, some very serious claims must be abandoned and some attitudes completely changed. No board ever got rid of a teacher or an investigator-no matter how weak or absurd except for immorality known to the board and likely to become known to the public. The reason why a board cannot deal with such a matter is the lack of individual confidence about what to do, and of individual responsibility for doing either something or nothing. But, with three or four hundred in the faculty, the need of attention to is this vital matter always present and urgent. No board knows where new men of first quality are to be found; no board can conduct the negotiations for them or fit them into an harmonious and effective whole. The man who is fitted for this great burden and who puts his conscience up against his responsibility can hardly be expected to tolerate the

opposition of an unsubstantial sentiment which would protect a teacher at all hazards, or the more subtle combination of selfish influences which puts personal over and above public interests when the upbuilding of a university is the task in hand.

Not only must the teaching staff be developed, -the work must be organized. It must develop a following, connect with the circumstances and purposes of a constituency, and lead as well as it can up to the peaks of knowledge. It is not necessary that all universities cover the same lines of work or have the same standards. It is not imperative that all have the same courses or courses of the same length. It is necessary that all serve and uplift their people. But how? A master of literature will say through classical training and literary style; a scientist will say through laboratories; a political economist will say through history and figures and logic; an engineer will say through roads and bridges and knowledge of materials, and the generation and transmission of power and skill at construction; and a professional man will say through building up professional schools, providing no mistake be made about the particular kind of school. Some one of wide experience, having a scholar's training and sympathies, possessed of a judicial temperament and of decision as well, must have the responsibility and the initiative of distributing resources justly as between the multifarious interests, and binding them all into an harmonious and effective whole.

Difficult as that is, it is not the heaviest burden of university leadership. Ideals must be upheld and made attractive: they must be sane ideals which appeal to real men,—and not only to old men, but to young men. There must be no mistaking of dyspepsia for principle, no assumption that character grows only when powers fail; but a rational philosophy of life by which men may live as well as die. Nor is this all. There must be forehandedness. Some, one must be charged with the responsibility of peering into the future and leading forward. New and yet more difficult roads must be broken out. Some one in position to do it must be active in initiating things. He must see what will go, and, quite as clearly, what will not go. Subtle but fallacious logic-and a vast deal of it-must be resisted, greed combated, conceits punctured, resources augmented, influences enlarged, forces marshaled for practical undertakings, and the whole enterprise made to give a steadily increasing service to the industrial, professional, political, and moral interests of a whole people.

Then there is the management and guidance of students. One may as well complain because this country is a democracy as repine because the sons and daughters of the masses want to go to college. There is no ground for regret in the fact that our universities are not just like some universities over the seas. We have much to learn from them and we are likely to learn much. We have quite as much to