Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/325

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THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
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safely and with joy in hard work to its ever higher stages of study, research and discovery. But our intending professor can not go back into the fitting-school or into freshman year, and begin over again. He enters the graduate department. Here he has, with few exceptions, as colleagues in study, men who, like himself, are not well-grounded and who are unable or unwilling to submit to the prolonged and severe discipline which is necessary for the training of the intellectual athlete. He is prematurely set at "a problem" and works with an aspiring eye on the degree of Ph.D. That this description is not true alone of the few advanced students trained by the secondary educational system of this country, who are without serious purpose, I may cite the unanimous testimony of the professors and other officers at Oxford respecting the Ehodes scholars in general, as it was given to me on occasion of a recent visit there. They are, for the most part, fine, manly fellows, earnest in work and anxious to pick up whatever might seem fit for their advantage, but superficial in their attainments, eager to specialize minutely while as yet they know little or nothing thoroughly as to elementary matters in their chosen specialty, and restive under all manner of control, whether as touching manners, petty morals, the prompt keeping of appointments, or conformity to university regulations.

Now that our candidate is ready for his professorial career, how shall he get into a place which will at least give him a foot-hold for beginning a life-long race? He must be, as a rule, recommended by somebody (often some president) to some president, who will, if he thinks best, recommend him to the appointing board. This latter recommendation is usually equivalent to an appointment, although of late the sane custom of consulting some members of the faculty into which the candidate is to be introduced has begun to prevail. In popular parlance, he must push and be pushed. But every one who has had the long experience of the writer in such matters knows perfectly well that the willingness and skill to push one's self, and the vigor and success with which one is pushed by others, are quite as often in inverse as in direct proportion to the merits of one's case.

When all the preliminary stages are passed through, and the candidate has really the right to call himself professor—although the young ladies whom he used to meet at the summer resorts were wont to call him "professor" when he was in fact only a tutor or an instructor—unless he has a most self-sacrificing intellectual interest in his calling and a thoroughly ethical love for the work of the teacher, he finds that his position and its rewards are not at all what he fondly imagined they would be. His classmates who have gone into business or into the professions of law or medicine are in receipt of incomes two-fold or fourfold his own. They have a higher social standing; and those they have served with no higher degree of talents or of success are seemingly more grateful and ready in some form or other to show appreciation of the