cating a student undoubtedly encourages a sentiment which lurks inarticulate in the atmosphere of the place, to the effect that the student has conferred a favor on the state by recognizing the wisdom of its provisions and may, therefore, expect to be nurtured, protected, and ultimately aided to employment; all this, and "my father is a taxpayer," and "I will see about this" comes from the least worthy, while the best are asking themselves only: "What can I do in loyalty and love to repay my university for the inestimable gifts she has lavished upon me?" These observations must ever press home upon us the query whether it would not be better, whether it would not be fairer to the state and all its taxpayers, whether it would not be better for the students themselves if we compelled the few-the relatively few, who avail themselves of the state's provisions, to pay a part, e. g., a half or a third of what their education costs the state. An ample allowance of scholarship might then be used to prevent excellent students from losing thru lack of means the benefits of an education they deserve. As matters stand now, many students drift into the university merely because the high school is finished and this seems to be the next thing. Such abuses as dropping out of the university two or three weeks after registering would be checked. There would be less floating in and floating out. More would think twice. At any rate it is a fact that lack of the tuition fee conditions to some degree the peculiar atmosphere of the state university.

(g) The query we have just raised leads to another: is it or is it not true that the mass of the students in a state university show less spirit of loyalty to their institution than the students of a privately endowed university? They cheer just as loudly on the bleachers--but that arises out of the zest to win, and that is the same everywhere. It is my experience that at least the public-spirited half of the student body is quite as fervently loyal as in the other type of institution, especially if you give them and the alumni something to do. Otherwise they will leave the university's interests sleepily to the legislature and the regents, and

particularly the soggy lower half will feel no more ideal and patriotic zeal than that which inspires the hearts of our citizens at the sullen progress of the pork barrel thru the halls of Congress. It behooves the state university particularly to displace in the student mind the query, "What can I get out of my university?" with that better one: "What can I do for my university?" The state university even more than its privately endowed counterpart needs from all who are connected with it, students, teachers, graduates, and administrative officers, full exercise of this spirit of unselfish service. This is no fanciful supplement; it is a fundamental, essential constituent of the education the state provides, without which that training is a dry and hollow shell. It represents the attitude which a rightminded citizen must bear toward his country.

(h) The peculiar atmosphere of the state university bears with it by general consent a stronger ingredient of respect for and sympathy with the popular interest and will. This is in some part due to the relative prominence in its study lists of the applied sciences, but it goes deeper than this and bears constant tho not readily confest relation to the source of the bread supply in the appropriation bills of its master's crib. Tho the popular will often shows deficient interest in the cultural theories of education and often overestimates the value of imitating in the schools the vocational processes of actual life, it must be confest after real experience, that the popular mind knows what it wants in terms of educational results far better and more wisely than the trembling faith of the schoolmen has been willing to allow.

The American state university as it exists today in work, in scope, and in spirit is a peculiar institution-eminently so in its present combination of fields and duties. There never has been anything like it in any country or time; perhaps there will never be anything just like it in the epochs to come. But what it happens to be, just now, is due in greater measure to what the supporting communities desire it to be, i. e., to what parents and people want to have

taught and want their children to learn than has ever been the case in any institutions of the higher learning, since first education began to educe and pedagogues to profess.

All this has been attained, however, without direct and immediate application of the power of the public will. Wherever such direct application in the form of legislative interference or control has been attempted, the result has scarcely ever escaped some form or degree of disaster. Politics as represented by the legislative is in mood and manner so radically estranged from education and research as represented by the university, that is, the voltage is so different, that the two must in operation be firmly differentiated and

a

transformer introduced between them. This transformer has been found in the form of a commission called the Board of Regents, and the mechanism has been mounted and used on the whole with most beneficent results.

Anciently the government of the college as handed down to us from English tradition was vested in a Board of Fellows in whose hands lay undifferentiated the two functions of teaching and of holding and administering the property. From the very beginning, i. e., in the organization of Harvard College, American usage effected a differentiation between the two functions by creating a Corporation known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, and over against it a faculty, appointed by the corporation, but charged with the office of instruction. The relations of corporation and faculty became in the state universities the prototype of the relations of regents and faculty, between which two resides the president as automatic coupler, alternately squeezed and stretched, or in more violent collisions, alternately forced up into dangerous eminence and dragged beneath the wreck. Fortunate operation of the university machinery consists in a proper distribution of powers and tasks between the three elements: regents, faculty, president.

In last analysis under proper organization the Board of Regents undoubtedly represents outright the state to the university; but in the ordinary case and under normal conditions the Board of Regents represents more exactly

the state as a political body to the university as a mechanism for education and research. I suppose that the spiritual university as set down in the New Jerusalem will have no Board of Regents-and for that matter, presumably no president. Under existing mundane conditions, however, it is plainly essential to the quietude and effectiveness of the university that the board should exist, and that it should not be forced to share its powers with another state body like a Board of Control. As a board of audit, i. e., postaudit, the Board of Control will serve excellent purpose as assuring publicity and security, and unifying the state's financial administration, but the assumption of the right of pre-audit means inevitably a crippling of the Board of Regents which will reduce it into something analogous to the position of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Power drifts toward the money-bags.

In states where the university is divided into two or more institutions: the university proper, the Agricultural College, the School of Mines, and others, the establishment of a Board of Conference as between and over the two or more regent boards and made up chiefly of representatives from these boards, will help hold in check false competition and may render the state a good service, particularly if such board limit its meetings to the period of preparation for the session of the legislature, and limit its activity to the purpose thereby indicated.

The plan of creating one Board of Regents for the two or more institutions has yet to prove its value. The plan of dispensing with a board or boards of regents and committing all forms of educational institutions within the state in one fell congeriate mass into the hands of one all-supreme board, by whatever name it be named, means the touch of death for all the finer and higher things of the university; means a grizzly alternation between neglect and the intrusion of ignorant violence; means an inevitable ignoring of the distinctive office of the university as over against all other forms of educational endeavor-that office whereby it leads and inspires men to find out for themselves the way

to truth and appoints itself within the state against the insidious power of politics and wealth the one sure citadel of freedom of thought and freedom of speech.

The board of instruction constitutes the second element in our university organization. It is really the first, and for three good reasons: (1) the other two were historically differentiated out of it; (2) instruction and nurture are the central purpose of the institution; (3) the duties and opportunities of the teachers are not limited; the board of instruction naturally takes over such functions as the two other factors of the organization do not assume. The individual professors continually perform at need offices not "nominated in the bond." They are not employes of the university, but members of it. The right attitude of service in the manifold demands of the university can not be obtained or expected from men uncertain of their tenure; neither can freedom of thought, research or expression, especially in subjects traversed by the daily thought of the community. Without such freedom we lose the full value of the teacher's presence among us. If the teacher is hampered, whose ideas does he teach? Those of the regents? of the president?-or of the legislature? But science does not follow the election returns. Within the range of the teacher's special equipment and knowledge, not as oracle at large nor as bearing an arbitrary license, but in the name of his science, he must be free to teach. Otherwise the university is an imitation and a sham. We can better afford to be patient and tolerate a considerable degree of inefficiency in this or that chair than incur the suspicion of unseating a teacher for the views he may hold. On the other hand there are two things that must be said: (1) Inefficiency can not be permanently used as a shield; (2) the students who are seeking instruction have some rights. In proceeding against a professor for incompetency no step should be taken without full and careful conference with his nearest colleagues in the faculty, preferably in a body as well as individually. The professors themselves above all others should be vitally interested in helping establish