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the standards of their profession by aiding in the excision from the teaching staff of dry rot, incompetence, indifference and misfits. The American Association of University Professors will render both to itself and to education worthy service, and one proceeding straight toward the chief need of the hour if it will but undertake the determining of methods by which this amelioration can be justly and safely effected. A way can be found whereby the faculty can take the chief part in purging itself. It can do it better than the president alone. From what I have seen I am convinced beyond a peradventure that it will do it far more thoroly. And the president whose path is sad enough at the best will be relieved of a lonesome duty which brings him today the chief misunderstanding and odium attaching to the administration of his office. In preparing to nominate to the regents for the filling of a professorial vacancy the president will find it wise to act with the counsel and consent of the most nearly related chairs, except that in the case of institutions far removed from the source of supply the president who must travel in search of men may be expected to interpret more broadly the nature of this "counsel and consent." It can never be in wisdom overlooked that in many important regards a college faculty is a community of colleagues; and this constitutes one prime reason why the maintenance of the old-fashioned faculty meeting is worth while, even in the large university where councils, committees, and department meetings in full organization absorb the handling of special interests and details. It is good to have a free forum corresponding to the scope of the whole community where any matter may reach the open air and any item seek its final philosophic category, no matter if waste do seem to be involved. Efficiency is not everything. The family, for instance, is not an institution which stands or falls on the sole issue of efficiency.

The third chief factor in the university organization is the presidency. This office is not to be viewed either as the residence of power or the fountain of educational policy.

As correctly viewed it is set in the centre of the university, not at its top, and is set there as an integrating force and a regulator. It holds equal relations to students, faculty, ' and regents, and maintains by natural right a membership in each of the three bodies. As an integrator it seeks to draw together into unity the various elements which should compose the university. As a regulator it seeks to distribute work and weight according to the law and the equities, giving "to each his portion of meat in due season." The president is not only a universal coupler, but a universal buffer. A high degree of elasticity and particularly of resiliency a university president must surely possess, and on the whole this is more essential than a teeming force of initiative. Hard rubber is perhaps more nearly the emblem of the office than steam, but it is not safe utterly to omit the bat. The incumbent of the office must command versatility of talents, catholicity of sympathy, and patience, but the greatest of these is patience; in addition hereto the state university president must possess a high degree of public-mindedness, wide democratic charity for people and things just as they come, a certain hardiness of temperament, and considerable thickness of skin. There are many who lay great stress upon tact and caution and the wisdom of the serpent, and surely all these things must be done and not left wholly undone, but it is possible our experiences have already made some of us so diplomatically tactful of act that we can not be discerned as to whether we are going or coming, and so cautiously wise of utterance that we stutter.

The university president has little occasion to ask for increase of power particularly as against the faculty. The man who is asking for a "free hand" is on the wrong track. What the president wants is not more power but more sharing of responsibilities and better distributed cooperation. He is not the one spring of university policy nor is he a French or English Premier to make an issue of his own views and threaten to resign if he does not have his way. When it comes, however, to the formulation of policy into action that is another matter. So also as against the re

gents in the matter of appointment or displacement of teachers; here he must be given, after consultation with the faculty as outlined above, the right of initiative, the regents of course reserving to themselves the right of rejecting his recommendations.

No president can give an institution his best service where his tenure stands in continual jeopardy. The evils of such a situation are not abated by appointment for a stated term; the perils are only focused thereby more definitely upon a single period. To begin with-no man should be entrusted with functions capable of such violent and arbitrary use as to offer continual temptations to unseat him; but finally, if in spite of every precaution in his selection and appointment he prove unfitted to his task he should accept without odium retirement from his executive position and continue in a position as teacher. No man should ever be appointed to a presidency who is not master of some subject of instruction and competent to teach. One pregnant source it is of our present difficulties regarding the presidential office that we have been differentiating too sharply between teaching and administration. Deanships and presidencies ought not to be encouraged in the development of a separate administrative caste. Teaching is the main business of a university.

The American state university is undoubtedly passing thru a crisis in its affairs. Not because the people oppose or distrust it, rather because the people expect so much of it, and desire so much of it, are so many proposals rife for its amendment. Its reestablishment in normal and orderly use will come not by radical undermining of its foundation walls nor by the adding of fanciful verandahs and the hanging of festoons, but by some plain adjustments in simple architecture under calm restraint against undue expansion. The perpetuity of the structure in essentially its present proportions is guaranteed in the plain persistence of the public need.

UNIVERSITY of California

BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER

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IV

CORRESPONDENCE-STUDY TEACHING1

The uncounted ages of the race have slowly and often painfully given us the institutions which mark the course of human progress. One of the great institutions, without which no civilization would be possible, is that through which the experience, attainments and aspirations of the race are systematically and methodically passed on from generation to generation, and this institution we think of in general terms as the school.

That particular form of this institution which concerns us here is the college and university. Thru the centuries this, or its equivalent, was the great institution of teaching and training. Up to modern times teaching may be said to have been its sole function.

But a great change took place after the Napoleonic upheavals when in Germany very definite new policies in education were set into action for the purpose of achieving equally definite ends. These policies comprised a complete educational system for Germany, but that aspect of the system which has the profoundest significance is found in the elaboration of a plan developed by the cooperation of several great minds but finally organized by the great imperial minister of education, Von Humboldt, for a new type of university. In his plan presented to Kaiser Frederich Wilhelm he declared that the best-the ideal place for promoting the search for the truth and the advancement of knowledge was in the university, where the scholar was surrounded by his students. In founding the University of Berlin, 1809, that was the unique, definitely designed purpose of the new institution. Thus consciously, deliberately, and confidently was written into the consti

1 An address delivered at the First National Conference of Extension Teaching, Madison, Wis., March 11, 1915.

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tution of the modern university a new function; that of research. I say the modern university for the new idea had the dynamic power to beget itself. The new ideal for the modern university, it may be truly said, spread like a prairie fire during the century that followed. The development of the scientific method, and all that belongs to it, are well known. Great has been the addition to our knowledge -wonderful has been the stimulation in world progress.

But this discovery and accumulation of knowledge. soon far outran its dissemination and assimilation. In response to a demand for a more democratic share in the enjoyment of the new learning, efforts were inaugurated for the extension of university teaching in England and elsewhere. The settlement movement-exemplified in the founding of Toynbee Hall, the Neighborhood Guilds (now University Settlement, New York), and Hull House is a part of the current set into motion by that overflow of wholesome, splendid university growth and feeling, the ripe and normal fruitage of institutional evolution. It found an expression in the "Light and leading" phrase of Matthew Arnold and the words of Goldwin Smith "Above the humanities is humanity." And yet these were but premonitory signs it seems, as was also the prophetic declaration of Ezra Cornell in declaring "I would found an institution where any person may find instruction in any study."

The first organized effort in this country was called the Society for the Extension of University Teaching. It seems strange to some of us that an elementary basic principle of pedagogy, which requires the fitting of the instruction of the requirements of the learners, did not receive adequate attention from these excellent pioneers. But for the most part the movement, so far as it was fostered by the university, was what it announced itself to be, and must, therefore, when applied to miscellaneous groups of ever so earnest would-be learners end in failure. Bishop John H. Vincent in his prophetic work did, however, see clearly some of the underlying needs. He foresaw that a

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