"PROFESSOR, HOW COULD YOU?"

"Ordinary professors are overpaid. After the first forty years of his life, the ordinary professor, like the New England farmer, gets discouraged and begins not doing more than a third or fourth of the things which he is at liberty to do. He begins to see that his profession does not adequately test him for any definite achievement in his line. . . . I am acquainted with no more essentially sluggish, improvident, resourceless, unambitious, and time-wasting creature than the ordinary professor of forty, nor anything more empty of adventure or hope than the future years of his career, daily to be occupied in matching his wits with the flat modiocrity of successive generations of adolescent C-students, and patiently waiting till the death of some better man, hardy and long-lived, allows him to slip into a larger pair of old shoes."

Stuart Sherman, once professor at Illinois, now editor of the book review of the New York Herald Tribune thus places the gentleman of the faculty in his niche to gather dust, and turns to another "Letter to a Lady."

And within a few weeks and in many journals contented professors will reply. But can they--with candor? The shoes Mr. Sherman mentions are old, the C-men many. Yet the real professor, a fellow of research, a leader of youth, though he must dislike the old shoes, likes the C-men. For by sincere effort he can make them "B" men--if not in college, at least in life. His calling is hard. The need of improving it remains the ghost in American academic closets. But if he is a true teacher he will enjoy it--enjoy it far more than Mr. Sherman--who is evidently more of a journalist than a faculty member. Indeed, to that inimitable essayist and Puritan, one must remark "Professor, How Could You?"