graduate loyalty to the college in securing new instructors and professors. The result has been an undue proportion of their own alumni on faculties. Inbreeding in college faculties is as disastrous as it is elsewhere. The colleges are doomed to continued inefficiency unless salaries are increased a great deal more than most boards of trustees now have in mind. The college professor does not need to live in style, but he needs money just as much as many who do so live—he needs it for actual professional efficiency.
Not only does lack of funds hamper a college in securing a scholarly faculty; it means also more or less deficiency in the material equipment the faculty has to work with. Even Mark Hopkins had his log! Trustees, it is true, are too frequently dazzled by architects' plans and devote money to the erection of buildings which would better have gone to the building up of the faculty, but often, on the other hand, little attempt is made to furnish material equipment to teachers and departments so that they can do their work with a minimum drain of energy in routine and clerical work, and improve the actual effectiveness of their teaching. The science, language and mathematics departments usually fare the best, because they have established a vested interest in small classes and adequate (?) teaching force, and an elaborate material equipment of laboratory apparatus. The departments whose only laboratory is the library fare badly. It is comparatively easy to get donors to give for buildings but difficult to get money for salaries or books—which are the real library. A good library should be able to provide ample reading, reference and working material for all undergraduate demands, and in addition should spend a great deal of money upon journals and reviews, foreign works and reports of learned societies which never meet the undergraduate eye, but which nevertheless keep the teacher alive in his subject. How far most college libraries fall short of even the minimum requirement will be apparent to any one who looks up the statistics of American college libraries.
Lack of funds, then, hampers the development of that large, broad and human scholarship we need, not only because college poverty means low salaries, but because it means too few teachers, too wide a range of subjects for the same instructor to teach, too many hours a week of class-room work, too little time for original research and original thinking. "Out of hurry nothing noble ever did or can emerge," says a recent writer.[1] Hurried on one side by too much work to do, hampered, on the other, by a disastrous deficiency in library funds and material equipment, it is small wonder that the teaching of many a professor is sometimes mechanical and far removed from the actualities of life.
Here lies the great field for constructive administration. In so far as mentors of the college are planning devices for mechanically improving student scholarship through prizes and distinctions and the like, or
- ↑ C. H. Cooley, "Social Organization," p. 170.
