College president

“ The model college president has been the man who could know or divine everything that is going on among the students, and circumvent and disconcert them in all their little irregularities. Under this system it has ever been the ambition of the students to beat the faculty, and it naturally engenders a state of antagonism between the students and the governing authorities. ”

“ To be provost, to be college president or university professor, is to be seated on an intellectual throne.
The problem of academic rule is not to attract a large number of students, to put up imposing buildings, to have endowments, and fill chairs with learned specialists; to grant many degrees, and to keep the hum of a teaching staff and of a student body alive in the ears of a community, marking the college group by flags and colors, cap and gown, processions and occasions. ”

“ Our college presidents and professors are called upon for the most important and difficult public functions. When New York City needs its leading citizen it finds him in the presidential chair of Columbia University. When Mr. Cleveland retires from public life, he allies himself with a university. There is no other office so fit for a past president of the United States as the presidency of a university. ”

“ The American college was poor in those days, and its scanty funds were held in trust by a body of men who, that they might be impersonal and disinterested, were chosen from outside the college. As the college grew in wealth this group of trustees grew in importance, and gradually assumed not simply the investment of college funds, but the actual management of the college itself. Needing a representative within the college, they naturally chose the president, conferring on him autocratic authority, and correspondingly curtailing the power of the faculty. ”

“ Such is the tradition of the American College President, -- and, in so far, of the university president, -- as it comes down from that earlier phase of academic history from which the office derives its ostensible character, and to which it owes its hold on life under the circumstances of the later growth of the schools. And it will be noted that this office is distinctly American ”

“ A former university president at the recent inauguration of one of his successors enumerates some twenty qualifications that should be found in the man who fills the office, although he states that "the qualities which enter into the making of an ideal college president are very widely distributed and never can be found represented in a great many men." ”

“ The office of college president, as it now exists, should be abolished; each faculty in a university or the single faculty in a college should choose its own executive head, who should be simply primus inter pares and should be the mouthpiece of his faculty in conference with other faculties or with the trustees. In a university, the several executives would be a council to determine matters affecting the policy of the institution as a whole. ”

“ Alderman, who has been superintendent of schools, professor of pedagogy and for four years president of North Carolina and of Tulane, has the educational experience which will become more and more essential for a college president, and the gift of oratory which perhaps in the future will be regarded less highly than at present. His administration began with the announcement of gifts from our two ubiquitous eleemosynaryists, and there is every reason to foresee that the university will increase in wealth and in numbers. ”

“ As a matter of fact, the college president who represents the so-called public institutions is in the more humiliating position of the two; for the free lance man has an open field, he can get himself invited to dinner-parties, and always has the hope that some day he may run into a politer plutocrat; but the president of a state university has no choice, he has to deal with the “boss” whom he finds in power. ”

“ A strong effort is being made to have the leading colleges give but one degree, that of Bachelor of Arts, and to confer that upon those who complete any substantial course of college studies. A marked change has taken place in the attitude of the college authorities toward the students. In 1870 the college president was a paterfamilias. He knew each student and came into direct personal contact with him. The president and the faculty had supervision not only of the studies of the students, but of their moral and religious life as well. ”

“ In education Yale has had great influence through the college presidents it has trained. As President Northrop pointed out in his address, one hundred and five graduates of Yale have been president of a college; and eighty-five different colleges have at some time had a Yale graduate for president. Yale furnished the first president of at least seventeen colleges—Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Georgia, Williams, Hamilton, Kenyon, Illinois, Wabash, Missouri, Wisconsin, Beloit, California, Cornell, Western Reserve, Johns Hopkins and Chicago. ”

“ The benefactor has long been recognized as a powerful, although unacknowledged, influence in the administration of the college on a private foundation. Pie is a member of the board of trustees and as such wields great authority. He is consulted on all matters of college policy, his wishes are deferred to whenever a difference of opinion arises between him and his colleagues, and he is the power behind the throne on which sits the college president. To him more than to any other giver is applied the adage that one must not look a gift horse in the mouth. ”

“ The next step in the evolution of the college president came when the college was frequented by young men whose career in life was to be, not the ministry, but one of the other learned professions, or business, or some branch of applied science. This necessitated the development of the secular side of education, and with this development came the demand for increased appliances, for laboratories, for large additions to libraries and museums, for the enlargement in every direction of the educational plant. ”

“ At any rate, such a paragon would be worthy of succeeding to that famous chair of the Harvard faculty once occupied by a gentleman whom the trustees hired as the Plumber professor of Christianity, but whom the undergraduates irreverently dubbed the Christian professor of plumbing.
And so the other end of the scale, the college president. He too is said sometimes to be discontented; and again his discontent may assume either one of two 90 forms. He may be ambitious of size and réclame for his institution, and may measure his dignity by the number of students over whom he presides. ”

“ Transferred from the personal to the corporate relation, the breach in educational policy is coming to be more and more between the professors fundamentally interested in the ends of education and the president and deans dominated in their educational interests by an administrative temper or habit of mind. "The millionaire and the college president are simply middle men who transmit the pressure from the average citizen to the learned classes." "The educated man has been the grain of sand in the college machine. ”

“ In any case, the college president, to be a successful manager, must have tact; he must have executive capacity and force; he must be business-like in his methods, he must command the confidence and respect of trustees, teachers, students, alumni, and of the community in which he lives; he must be a good judge of men ”

“ Those who idealize the independence of the state-university are apt to forget that it has its own seamy side. At the same time, to strengthen his appeal, the college president is expected to create a larger clientele among the public, and, for all these purposes, to organize the alumni into a compact fighting force. This means that he must be half the time traveling and making speeches. The demands upon him for talk alone are usually far in excess of any normal capacity for thinking ”

“ His faculty have no means of asserting themselves, and are, accordingly, not in a position to command his respect. In the organization of the college they have been deprived of all real authority. They stand powerless before the president, as he would stand powerless before the trustees were there to be a conflict of authority between them. Naturally his views of college policy are modeled after those of the men who control him rather than those of the men and women who are so abjectly under his control. ”

“ And such a condition is fully in accord with the popular notion respecting the president's duties; the position needs a man of great executive capacity, great energy, magnetic personality, capable of keeping himself in public view, so as to advertise the university, to attract students and to increase the resources. Recently a new president was chosen for a promising young college. ”

“ It is equally bad to encourage the popular misconception o*f academic service by throwing the limelight either upon administrative position or upon athletic prowess or upon any but the central purpose for which the university exists. It was far different in the older simplified college, in which the president was commonly the leader of the faculty, the embodiment of the spirit of the institution, distinguished for just what the academic sanction of the day approved, and quite incidentally an administrator. ”

“ But many college professors do believe that every question of legislation that concerns the educational work of the college no matter how remotely or how indirectly should be acted upon by themselves, that they should have representation on the boards of control, and most of all that they should be educationally enfranchised to the extent of choosing their own president. ”

“ The ideal condition will be impossible until those controlling the affairs of colleges have learned that they are not owners, hut trustees, and have to come to recognize their responsibility as honest and honorable men; until they have become convinced that it is less important for a president to be making addresses on public affairs than it is for him to attend to college affairs —for which he should lie held to strict accountability. ”

“ It might even be well, in order to strengthen the President, to give him the right of appeal to the Mayor and Councils, in case of an irreconcilable difference of opinion between him and the Directors. Everything depends upon the President. Given the right President, with power enough and time enough, and the success of the College is assured. Given a bad President, or a good one hampered by committees, or too dependent upon a board, and the College will be the reproach of Philadelphia. ”

“ Any nation, as -- to paraphrase what the vice -- the president- elect just said -- any nation that outcompetes us -- out-educates us will out-compete us. It's that basic. And that means a stronger commitment to our high schools, our elementary schools, but also our community colleges, and it means college degrees must be within the reach of all -- all -- of our children, for nothing less is good enough. ”

“ They are organized upon that basis, and run upon that basis, and the problem of changing them is simply one of the problems of Americanization. The college must become a democratic republic, run by its citizens and workers.
That brings us to the second demand of the college professor; not merely must he have security in his job, he must have collective control of that job, he must say how the college shall be conducted, and what higher education shall be. That means that he must take from the trustees, and from their hired man, the president, the greater part of their present functions. ”

“ It is based upon nothing except the feeling of the faculty that as the president is in a peculiarly responsible position both to the trustees and to the public, because his view is necessarily wider and more comprehensive than that of the professors through his relation to the public, because there are after all other considerations than those of any particular classroom which must affect the college policies—for these and other reasons his wishes are entitled to some weight. The president has no veto over the action of the faculty. ”

“ Editors, essayists, college presidents and reformers assure us that we are on the verge of a change, and perhaps a great change, in our system of higher education. They dilate upon the indisputable fact that most of our older colleges have made rapid strides within the past ten years, augmenting their endowments, erecting handsome buildings, establishing new departments of study and increasing the number of students. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, were never so well off, in point of money and men, as they are at this day. ”

“ For one college probably an accredited school is merely a school that can furnish students, and admission by certificate serves the convenient purpose of removing responsibility from the college authorities without fixing it anywhere. The president knows his own interests, and avoids expressing adverse criticism if a student admitted is found badly prepared, because the principal may be offended and may advise his pupils to go to another college. ”

“ With the exception of student-government president, no office brings to its recipient the honor and prestige of the senior presidency. From the time that the freshmen enter the college until the fall of their last year, the question retains its importance. Who, of all their number, will be best qualified to lead the class, socially, politically and finally, during that greatest week of a senior’s life—at the commencement time?
Marjorie Wilkinson’s three years at Turner College had already been filled with positions of honor and responsibility ”