of the president, but in the professors he finds only material for ridicule. Teachers as a rule are impractical; faculty meetings seem to be but burlesques, and he clinches his description of unfitness by the broad assertion that faculties can not be entrusted with the selection of professors. In reading such statements one can not repress amazement that men so efficient as many college professors are in executive work, in political affairs, in corporations of many types, should lose all as soon as they come into contact with their life's work. At the same time he finds comfort in remembering that some important colleges in this country exist to-day only because professors assumed the business burden when trustees had thrown it down in despair; and he can not forget that the most successful presidents, judged even from the ordinary standpoint of success, were chosen from the faculties of the colleges over which they preside. One is at least safe in asserting that the training of college professors in business matters is quite equal to that of men in the clerical profession, from which so many college presidents have been selected.
Both trustees and presidents act on the principle that professors need guardians. The college faculties, especially, are practically ignored; little by little their authority has been curtailed until now it extends little beyond the class-room. In some of the larger institutions, faculties no longer choose their officers. Faculty meetings in some departments are unimportant affairs, and professors attend them as they perform other unimportant things, because they are on the list of duties. Certainly the meetings are characterized by pointless discussions, but this is due to the presiding officer, the president himself or his representative, who lets go his hold on the tiller and leaves the craft to wander at will. But there is no reason why the discussions should be other than aimless; decisions carry no weight except in matters wholly insignificant. The board of trustees in its innocence is available to correct any erroneous decision. Professor Jastrow refers to a case in which the faculty was informed that its action was a matter of indifference, that the trustees would decide the matter as the president wished. The writer has learned of another case in which the faculty received no such preliminary information, but was permitted to waste its energies in long and careful consideration of a proposition involving an important principle. Not many days after the decision was reached, the faculty was called together to receive information that their action had been overslaughed by the trustees. How much interest or importance should attach to faculty meetings is not difficult to comprehend.
Some newspapers have much to say respecting subordination of professors to millionaires who have given large sums to colleges. The writer has found none of this among professors and he has yet to find
