COMMISSION BASIS

Novelty pervades the suggestion of President Loree of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad that college professors be paid on a commission basis for additional entrants attracted to their courses. Mr. Loree, who is also a university trustee, complains that there is no method of determining the proficiency of professors, and he believes that if his plan were adopted high-power efficiency would be the aim of every lecturer.

The adoption of this system would inevitably lead to some of the worst evils to which the lecture platform has shown tendencies of succumbing. Any plan which regulates a professor's remuneration by his degree of attractiveness to the student body is inimical to sound instruction. The platform would be strewn with sawdust, and the lecture hall become a circus ring for pedagogic antics. Eminent professors at Harvard have on occasion carried their idealism so far as to request that students refrain from applause at the end of the hour, lest the educator quite humanly give way to the pot-boiling popularizer.

The decline of medieval scholarship was partly a result of the necessity of teachers depending upon the favor of students for the continuance of their incumbency. If raising professorial salaries is a means of averting a like decline in modern instruction that step should be taken. But every effort ought to be made to prevent the monetary reward of a professor from hinging on his ability to capture popular attention, or from being subject to the caprice of the mob. Mr. Loree's proposal is a far cry from the day when the Athenian youths flocked to the gratuitous discourses of Socrates.