"$50,000 FOR PROFESSORS!"

For years the fallacy has persisted that those who enter the profession of teaching must renounce all hopes of a respectable income and serve for the joy of serving. In the Forum for October Mr. Frank Bohn iconoclastically scouts the logic of this attitude. If professors, by leaving the academic fold, he argues, can compete successfully in business and command salaries many times greater than those they received for teaching, there must indeed be something radically wrong in college administration. The blame for this situation the writer lays on the heads of the university presidents and boards of trustees who are "afflicted by our American craze for mere size." He relates statistics of the enormous gifts in the last ten years to institutions of higher learning and suggests that instead of using these bequests for greater plants, more teachers, and facilities for bigger enrollments, all major gifts should be devoted for a decade to the increase of salaries.

Admittedly such a plan would be attended with serious difficulties, even granted that donors left their legacies with no strings attached and that presidents and trustees were willing to use them for this purpose; yet such a proposal does much to emphasize the sorry scheme of modern education. There is every argument against permitting one of the most highly specialized and invaluable professions to remain the least remunerative, and a wretched least at that.

The number of teachers who are continually deserting the ranks for the substantial returns of business may not be alarming, yet the annually increasing numbers of brilliant men who are drawn at the outset of their careers into the highly paid fields is providing incalculably disastrous both for American universities and for the American people. The effect is far reaching and even the standards of national thought, culture, and life itself are suffering a profound erosion. Two and a half billions of dollars in the last decade have been donated the the higher institutes of learning and imposing plants and Gothic quadrangles have sprung up on every hand. Only the reward of the vital instructor remains practically unchanged and the average full professor in American colleges is receiving the munificent salary of $3392 per annum. "Verily the mountain hath labored and brought forth a mouse."