Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1881-07-02
THE MANAGEMENT OF UNIVERSITIES.

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time there are pending some half dozen
serious difficulties Of similar kind. At
Yale, Cornell, Dartmouth and several
other universities and colleges great fric.
ton has latterly been developed between
the managing bodies and the faculty, and
in all these cases the result has been to in.
jure the institutions. The New York Ma
ton has very opportune article in its cur.
rent issue upon the subject of "The Col
leges and the Professors" in which it at
tempts to trace the genesis of these period
ical difficulties, and concludes that
they are largely if not altogether due to
the fact that in most cases the founders of
colleges, and those who are appointed to
manage them, possess the most indefinite
ideas as to the relation of the professors to
the university. The Nation thinks that
college-founders and Boards of Regents are
generally practical business men, who
know nothing or very little about educa-
tional processes, and who entertain gen.
er2l notion that if they spend a large
amount of money in putting up a sort OF
education factory, and then furnish ma
chinery in the shape of corps of profess
ors, it is only necessary to provide sharp
managers for the institution to secure its
successful conduct.
These founders and Regents, according
to the Nation, have very low opinion OF
professors, chiefly because the latter do
not earn large incomes. Your "practi-
zeal man generally measures all cosmic
phenomena by his specie standard, and de-
spises all who do not set their souls upon
the evolution of money. They worship
the Almighty Dollar in fact, and they re-
gard as heretics and outcasts all who dc
not worship it with them. To such per.
sons college professor is naturally very
poor sort of creature a sort of hybrid,
who is feeble-minded beyond the range Of
his studies, and who cannot be trusted at
all with the management of the institu
ton with which he is connected. In fact,
as the Nation puts it, the professor, in
"their eyes, is rather man who tends
college, as hand tends loom in a
mill, than a person fit to govern or di.
erect or manage an institution of any
"kind."
The result of this peculiar view is that
college.founders usually spend the bulk OF
their money upon costly piles of buildings,
and regard the selection of corps of pro-
fessors as very secondary and compare
lively unimportant matter. They do not
realize that there are professors and pro-
fessors. They think that all professors are
equally capable of performing their low
priced work, and that it is with them as
with common clerks almost anybody can
fill the situation. And this evidently was
the kind of spirit which inspired the Board
of Regents of our State University in its
recent raid upon the Faculty. Many Of
the members of that Board are practically
uneducated men. There are some college
graduates among them, but there are 9th.
ers who are politicians, practical bust
ness men, persons wholly ignorant OF
educational matters, even though they
have served after a fashion for several
years on this Board. How they regarded
the professors was shown by their treat.
ment of Professors LIE Conte and Welcker.
1t was almost brutal treatment, but it was
precisely what might have been expected
from men who looked upon professors as a
sort of clerks, to be removed or replaced
without ceremony.
The truth is that our universities are
mismanaged because they are managed by
such Boards, instead of by the professors.
The success of the German universities is
due to the fact that they have always been
entirely in the hands of the Faculty, and
that the discipline in all its parts has been
framed and administered by men thorough
ly familiar with the fundamental purposes
of the institution, and capable of directing
every detail to the fuller working out of
the system. The idea of regarding mere
buildings as the essential thing in an uni.
versity is an invention of American purse
proud ignorance. The only genuine uni
versity in this country, which is the Johns
Hopkins University at Baltimore, possesses
scarcely any regular buildings, and though
it has had an ample revenue from the be-
ginning started without them. And it is
clear that until the current delusion about
the Importance of buildings and the unim-
portance of professors is got rid of, we
shall have the same blunders as at present.
The public have to learn that the univer-
sity consists not in its buildings, not in its
apparatus, but in the intellectual equip
ment OF its corps Of teachers, and that
upon the force and fullness of this equip
ment its future must always be dependent.
And this realization must lead up to the
next important truth-which is, that the
management of an university ought to be
Entrusted to the professors, and not to
board of outsiders, chosen or appointed
out of politics, or er o6fcio, or in other
wholly preposterous and unreasonable
ways. Experience has clearly shown that
the tendency of such boards is naturally
toward mischievous courses that they
inevitably snub and depreciate the pro-
fessors; that the latter, being deprived of
all real authority in the university, are in
capable of directing its course; that be-
cause of this irrational deprivation of
authority it is found impossible to main
tain the proper discipline that there can
be no esprit du corps under such circum.
stances that the system generally
is paralyzing and pernicious, in
short, and that it ought to be reorganized.
Unfortunately the trainers of the new