RULERS OF LEARNING

"The American College and Its Rulers" by J. E. Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., is the latest addition to the Dollar Series, published by "The New Republic." Were this a flippant parade of personal prejudice similar to the recently printed work of Mr. Summerfield Baldwin, one could treat it other than seriously. Dr. Kirkpatrick is not, in any sense, flippant. Nor does he show any but an abstract prejudice against the states quo in university administration. Carefully, soundly, he build a theoretical case with which one can heartily agree.

Yet in education one dare go no great distance, leaning upon theory alone. That must be the criticism, in the large, of Dr. Kirkpatrick's effort. He is a firm believer in the eventual effectiveness of democracy. "Academic democracy," he states, "is here used to indicate that type of school very rare as yet in which first the patrons and supporters, second, the teachers and officers of administration, and finally, the pupils or students are so related to each other that they share mutually in the conduct of all the major as well as the minor activities of the school." And later he continues, "In some way, by constitutional or by formal grant of power from the legal bodies, authority must be transferred to the resident academic community, if they are to enjoy that liberty which belongs to a democratic state or industry. Boards of lay trustees must be entirely dispensed with or come to be regarded, and to function, as mere fiduciary bodies having only powers of review and in veto strictly limited to a budgetary total...only by a return to the early democratic practice with respect to the teaching profession and by an extension of it to include the student community can there he developed a type of school which shall serve as research departments or laboratories for our great and complex political and industrial societies."

The inference, if not complete here, is made so in the chapters which follow, in a series of reviews, revealing the growth of various institutions of higher learning in this country, he develops his theory that, only by a return to the community college, the guild college, can the needs of a democratic people be satisfied.

His reasons, briefly, are these: the modern college president, caught between the devil and the sea of trustee and faculty opinion, crippled by his load of financial responsibility, torn at by his mis-understanding undergraduates is, at best, a harried and futile dictator, at worst, the ancillary official of major interests without the college; the modern board of trustees are a group, unskilled in matter academic, educational--men of affairs without the interest of the college at heart, middle class, bread and butter people as ineffective as they are powerful; the faculty is a poorly paid group, subservient to their extra-academic employers; the under-graduates, a now often revolutionary group, merely because of the absence of complete intellectual freedom. Nor are his reasons other than sane and convincing.

There is no question, but that the modern university president must love his task, for it is a tremendous, often impossible one. Dr. Kirkpatrick's suggestion of the eventual sharing of the presidential responsibility among a small group only lacks the assurance that such a group would work better together, that they would accomplish more, and, at least the President of Harvard University would agree that such an establishment was an approach to the perfect in university administration. Dr. Kirkpatrick can only hope for such cooperation. Could he promise that the faculty, now striding the twin steeds of scholarship and teaching with what grace is possible, would be even beter poised with the third steed of university administration added--then his faculty government might appear equally necessary. And last if he could only match that famous line concerning youth's lack of knowledge, and age's lack of strength, he might convince undergraduates at Harvard that they have an active, legislative function in university administration.

Like all critics of the status quo, and they are essential preventatives of innocuous decay, Dr. Kirkpatrick has found an ill without finding a cure other than one so remote as to exist in the and of dreams. While the faculty is a group of specialists in learning, while the undergraduate is attempting to gain some conception of what that learning means to his world and to him, there is little time for administrative functioning.

Their duty must remain, if not purely contemplative, at least advisory. Not a cooperative educational unit in the legislative or administrative sense, but an organization, which component parts have a common respect; that must be the hope of Harvard. So long as the undergraduate is sanely critical in effective way, through his undergraduate organizations, so long as the faculty has the independence concomitant with excellence in their own field; so long as the Fellows, the Overseers recognize the excellence of the one and appreciate the criticism of the others, then there is no need to build an Antioch Dr. Kirkpatrick's ideal in Cambridge.