presented for the approval of the faculty. With the proper spirit, the essential ends are accomplished by either procedure.

When we come, secondly, to the matter of promotions and salaries, the situation acquires a sombre cast. In some few institutions the methods, though not perfectly so, are commendable, in many others moderately perverse, in the rest intolerable. Merely because that is another story, (yet a closely related one), do I reluctantly pass by the burning question of the inadequacy of professors' incomes. I content myself with the expression that were those salaries as nearly adequate as they could readily become were sentiment properly effective, certain of the administrative problems would find readier solution; yet in saying this I wish also to emphasize the converse: that were our administrative provisions more suitable, the professors' financial status would have been far more favorable than it now is-and of this more anon. That there obtain widely different opinions as to what a professor should be paid is inevitable; that there should prevail such general misconception as to what influences should determine his compensation, is not inevitable, only unfortunate. This text, also, I must not allow myself to elaborate, though there is strong temptation to do so.

As an administrative policy, the salary problems should be and in large measure can be solved by preventing them from arising. Policy is here all important. With many others, I hold as desirable above. all other arrangements, an effective provision that shall pledge a definite and dependable living for worthy service. This would go. far toward avoiding the constant and irritating perplexities that from time to time, and in some institutions at the close of each academic year, present themselves with threatening features to be somehow appeased. A system of this general type is well established at Harvard University. What I emphasize as essential therein is that men are elected to positions of definite rank, for definite periods, with definite understandings. The central issue that is to be determined at the close of the period is whether the university desires to retain the services of the occupant; if so, he steps to the next grade with constantly increasing salary. A normal line of advancement is thus provided. More rapid promotion is always open to promptly established worth and efficiency, and should indeed be the rule, not the exception. Such measures of elasticity the system designedly retains. There is always opportunity for any one to present such considerations as may be proper, and to reenforce them by such arguments as may be suitable, to urge the promotion at such time and in such degree as the circumstances warrant. Speaking generally for all whose fitness for the academic life has been established, the question of salary is as nearly as possible disposed of; and advancement is secure. Such a system represents about as practicable a compromise between ideal

and available measures as present circumstances permit. It has at all events the supreme advantage of minimizing, and, in a fortunate environment, of avoiding wholly the endless disaffections and positive injuries that are inevitable when such matters depend wholly upon. the decision of one or two men, whose natural ambition under present circumstances is only too likely to regard the salary item in the budget as the one that admittedly should be first, but is likely to come last. The administrative feeling creeps in or is openly defended that so long as places can be filled, salaries are not the first consideration. It is this phase of the presidential activity that estranges him from colleagueship with his faculty.

How far down in the academic scale this system is applicable cannot be determined off-hand. Yet in the spirit of an institution in which such a system is liberally administered, it should be easy to place the greatest emphasis upon offering to the men of promise in the on-coming generation the utmost encouragement to rise rapidly in their profession; and to do this as is done in all learned professions, by the judgment of their peers with reference to true academic standards. The point is important as indicating how one set of administrative measures largely avoids difficult and undesirable situations, that another deliberately invites. It is important that a living within the academic fold should not be regarded as a reward to be given to the exceptionally deserving when circumstances indicate that the only method of retaining their services is to yield what for years has been unwisely and unjustly withheld, but is to be regarded as a natural privilege for all worthy of the academic life. There is not the slightest discrepancy in the inevitable fact that A and B, men of quite unequal merit and value to their institutions, should be enjoying the same incomes. There is nothing in the slighest degree disconcerting in so inevitable a consequence of human variablilty; and in a less commercially minded community, no one would think of remarking upon so obvious a situation. A man's academic worth should not and cannot in the least be measured by his salary; and any attempt to do so is a deep injury to the profession. If some one has made a mistake in judgment in asking a wrong man to fill a chair, when better men are available, and if the mistake cannot be remedied without repudiating obligations already incurred, it is far better to seek any solution of the situation than the one that sets the emphasis upon the very point that has no place in the academic life. Endowed professorships ensuring adequate livings are for this reason far more ideal a system than American circumstances make practicable.

I have thus dwelt upon the more serious of the unfortunate consequences of the dominant systemless practices in American institutions, and of the possibilities of their correction. It is even more than a misfortune; it is indeed an indignity that a scholar of tried worth and

reputation-one who in another country would be an homme arrivé, with a secure living-should still find the very wherewithal of his sustenance, and the appraisal of his rank meted out to him by the uncertain esteem of one or two of his colleagues—for such the president and the dean are placed in a position of authority by reason of qualities unrelated to any such Jupiterian function. His helplessness in a situation, for which inadequate administration or administrative autocracy has left no place for remedy, hardly even for protest, may well invite despair.

The disastrous consequences of this unfortunate situation appear most notably in the discordant notes that break into what remains of the cherished harmony of the academic spirit; and it appears in the loss of appeal of the academic career to those best fitted by endowments and interests to enter its ranks. The drift within the university is toward winning those marks of success upon which administrative dominance sets greatest store. Colleges engage in what the press is pleased to call a friendly rivalry to secure the largest crop of freshmen; and undue influences are set at work upon departments and professors to attract large classes. Facilitation of administrative measures and some practical executive effiiciency are far more apt to meet with tangible rewards than are more academic talents. It takes a sturdy determination, a sterling character and a large measure of actual sacrifice to withstand this manifold pressure. Those who resist it least, or are least sensitive to anything to be resisted, are likely to find themselves in the more prominent places; and so the unfortunate emphasis gathers strength by its own headway. The esprit of academic intercourse, the inspiration of individual character, the stamp of the dominant occupation, subtly yet inevitably lose their finer qualities. There comes to be developed a type of academician (sit venia verbo) who pursues his career in a decided "business" frame of mind. At the worst, he degenerates into a professional commis, keen for the main chance, ready to advertise his wares and advance his trade, eager for new markets, a devotee of statistically measured success. At the best, he loses with advancing years that mellow ripening of the scholar, lays aside all too willingly the protecting ægis of his ideals and his enthusiasm, and fails to maintain in his activity the very vital quality that appreciative students should, and commonly do look upon, and look back upon, as the choicest advantage of their academic intercourse.

If any one consequence of this serious situation may be rated more serious than the rest, it is the effect of it all upon the younger members of the instructional staff during the most valued portions of their lives." A Teutonic student of our educational situation recently pointed out to me this disastrous phase of our unadjusted university arrangements as the most potent reason for our unproductiveness in original effort and the chief obstacle to our cultural advance. He contrasted the

situation with that of the Privat-Docent, who, though with most precarious income, found no hindrance, when once launched upon academic seas, to shaping his career according to his talents, in steering for such ports and by such routes as his survey of the chart directed. That intense and crippling sense of accountability-to which President Pritchett has likewise directed attention-is all but absent from the Privat-Docent's career, as it is likely to crowd out by its insistent demands almost every other serious purpose of the young instructor. Confessedly the advantages are not all on one side; but the unnecessary hazards placed in the way of the academic aspirant among us, make the academic career partake altogether too largely of the nature of an obstacle race.

I am aware that the objection may arise to the sombre tones of my palette, that will protest that such a delineation is the natural result of viewing things through a murky atmosphere or through congenitally disposed obliquities of vision. The delusion is, however, a rather general one; the difficulty is only that it does not find public expression. It is in the confidential talk with others of kindred spirit and experience that a man's real opinions come to the fore. The front that he shows to the world-and that without any fair charge of hypocrisy—is wholly different from his private opinion for home consumption only. I have in mind a professor of national reputation, with a quartercentury of successful experience in distinguished institutions of the land, with many honors to his name and many public addresses to his credit extolling the successes of American education. This scholar had no hesitation in admitting to me confidentially that in any true sense we had no universities in this country, and certainly no academic life; and that in his own career a larger measure of his success than he cared to reflect upon, was probably due to his yielding to influences that his ideals condemned. With not the slightest breach of honesty in his purpose as conceived by approved standards, but with the inevitable compromise to practical necessities, his career had deviated from what under more favorable conditions it might well have been. Such a man is not to be censured; he is the victim of an unfortunate situation; and it is only because such situations may in large measure be relieved by a proper administrative temper, that it becomes proper to cite the instance in this connection.

It is well to return to the practical aspect of the situation. What the average university presents in lieu of an academic provision is little more than a corporation of an industrial type in which groups of men have been engaged to perform given tasks. The tasks are often liberally conceived, and personal worth properly regarded. Yet the temper is such that commercial considerations enter; and the tendency is rarely absent that makes the first duty of the management that of securing the work done upon the most economical basis possible. The

irrelevancy of this attitude is too complex a tale to attempt to disentangle here. Ideals and policy must come first; and practice can only be worthy when the motive force of such ideals can find expression. With the absence or the weakness of worthy ideals, lower ideals inevitably enter. In the present consideration it may be emphasized that a university can be built up about a group of professorships and about nothing else. Academic benefactors will not have accomplished their highest degree of efficiency until they recognize in such endowments the most intrinsically valuable form of aiding universities. Whatever hastens the day of liberally provided professorships will ennoble and simplify the administrative problems of universities.

A further class of administrative measures relate to the direction of university growth, the nature of its extensions, the distinctive. character of its purposes, its mode of meeting public needs. These questions are far more pressing in so rapidly a developing community as ours than they are in older civilizations in which the purposes of university activity have become fixed by convention. It is in regard to this set of measures that the initiative is so commonly taken by the president alone; and it is precisely with regard to these that the principles to which I adhere favor and demand a vital and authoritative consideration on the part of the faculty. It is because a portion of these measures must be determined by the provisions of the budget that to some extent the budget itself must be included in this group. As it is, faculty opinion has in most institutions no opportunity to express itself in regard to that which concerns the faculty most intimately. Upon this aspect of the matter I have touched in the general statement.

There is finally a group of minor administrative details, also involving financial matters, which intimately concern the academic. activities. I refer to such matters as modes of conducting laboratories, of securing material and all the inevitable business of handling apparatus, and the house-keeping side of instructional and investigative work. This is clearly partly a business matter, and as such belongs to the board, but likewise is it in equal part, a matter that affects the efficiency of the laboratory and its work. The contention thus seems just that some mode of administration shall be devised which shall be as satisfactory to the director of the laboratory in the matter of meeting his needs, as it shall be to the administration as business procedure. This, as many another question, is one that concerns jointly these two coordinating parts of university administration; and can be met only by joint consideration.

And now let us bring these various considerations into mutual relation. The system that so generally prevails and whose deficiencies detract from the value of the academic career may be called "government by imposition." Possibly this is a harsh word, but to the pro