Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/536

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532
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

lax, or the student may have been admitted at his own peril when safeguards ought to have been provided to shield him from certain failure. No guarantee of success can ever be given; but, if he fails, his misfortune ought not to be due to the imposition of a standard that is possible for only the exceptional man unless the subject is one that implies exceptional scholarship. Unnecessary failure is a calamity, and a fairly good student has the right to expect reasonable protection from it. Few institutions, however, venture upon such indiscriminate slaughter of the innocents as is implied in the case just cited. There may, of course, be exceptions, but in the majority of cases the real value of a diploma at the end of four years is quite fairly proportioned to the value of the entrance requirements at the beginning of that period.

The requirement of six professors giving their entire time to college work is one to which probably no exception can be taken by any who have real knowledge of the meaning of such work. A college to be successful must be well organized. Its head must be energetic, tactful, a good judge of men, thoroughly appreciative of high scholarship, a keen detector of efficiency in teaching, and the possessor of exceptional administrative power. Each professor must not only know his own subject, and how to teach it, but must be single-minded in his devotion to the interests of the institution. To devote most of his time, or even any considerable part of it, to the practise of a profession, with teaching thrown in as an incidental, is to ensure the sacrifice of the student's interests. Through the medium of the press he should keep in touch with the public, and especially with the educational and scientific world, but his main work is in connection with his students, and his income should be such as to make outside work unnecessary. So small a number as six of such men is scarcely sufficient to carry on the work of any modern college. If the New York law is objectionable the fault consists in prescribing a number that is too small rather than too large for a minimum.

The assignment of $200,000 as a lower limit for the productive endowment of a college is a very moderate recognition of what is implied in college teaching. With five per cent, as the rate of interest such a college would have but $10,000 as its income aside from students' fees. Assuming one hundred paying students at $100 each, the income is thus raised to $20,000. Of this, three fifths may be allowed for the cost of instruction, the rest being absorbed in the expenses of administration and operation. A salary allowance of but $2,000 is hence left for each of six professors, the president's salary being included in the cost of administration. The ratio of students to professors would be 100 to 6, or nearly 17, a number too large for the best efficiency. For reasons locally deemed satisfactory, many students are usually admitted without the payment of tuition, with no allowance to the professor for