Critique

False Leadership. A professor cannot run a bank. A banker cannot run a college.

Universities in America are run on business lines. The President speedily becomes the traveling salesman of a body of business Trustees or (in the case of a State university) an expert lobbyist. His bag never unpacked, he is ready to dash into his sleeper to catch the next conference or alumni banquet. He is never in his own library or among his own students.

"The scholar, who knows that his standards are not the standards of the crowd, is concerned not with quantity but with quality, not with the mounting curve of statistics but with the spirit working in secret places, not with the piling up of buildings but with the transmission of living ideas." On the contrary, the American college President plays Martha to the exclusion of Mary.

False Economy. Professors are not paid enough. Besides the bad results which everyone now realizes, there is also this: professors' wives are cut off from contact with the students and the intellectual life of the university; they are driven to frivolity, intrigue.

False Degrees. American universities swallow an alien spirit-- the ultra-German type of intellectual specialization. The increasing vogue of higher degrees, obtained by soul-destroying research, blunts and narrows the teacher and keeps red-blooded young men away from the teacher-business.

Alfred E. Zimmern, potent Welsh educator and economist, recently at Cornell, wrote an article for the New York Evening Post. His main criticisms of American colleges, as compared with English, are summarized above.

With the American student Professor Zimmern is delighted. The college boy is O. K., but the college has not yet learned how to play ball with him. And if the college does not soon learn, it will continue to be " for the student a finishing school, for the administration a business establishment, for the ordinary teacher a routine, for the investigator a means for supporting his researches, and for American life, as a whole, in relation to the real forces of the age, a tranquil and almost stagnant backwater."