It is a fact of the current state of things, grounded in the institutional fabric of Christendom; and it will avail little to speculate on remedial corrections for this state of academic affairs so long as the institutional ground of this perversion remains intact. Its institutional ground is the current system of private ownership. It claims the attention of students as a feature of the latterday cultural growth, as an outcome of the pecuniary organization of modern society, and it is to be taken as a base-line in any inquiry into the policy that controls modern academic life and work -- just as any inquiry into the circumstances and establishments of learning in the days of scholasticism must take account of the ecclesiastical rule of that time as one of the main controlling facts in the case. The fact is that businessmen hold the plenary discretion, and that business principles guide them in their management of the affairs of the higher learning; and such must continue to be the case so long as the community's workday material interests continue to be organized on a basis of business enterprise. All this does not promise well for the future of science and scholarship in the universities, but the current effects of this method of university control are sufficiently patent to all academic men, -- and the whole situation should perhaps trouble the mind of no one who will be at pains to free himself from the (possibly transient) preconception that "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men" is, in the end, more to be desired than the acquisition and expenditure of riches by the astuter men in the community.
Many of those who fancy themselves conversant with the circumstances of American academic life would question the view set forth above, and they would particularly deny that business principles do or can pervade the corporate management of the universities in anything like the degree here implied. They would contend that while the boards of control are commonly gifted with all the disabilities described -- that much being not open to dispute -- yet these boards do not, on the whole, in practice, extend the exercise of their plenary discretion to the directive control of what are properly speaking academic matters; that they habitually confine their work of directorship to the pecuniary affairs of the corporation; and that in so far as they may at times interfere in the university's scholarly and scientific work, they do so in their capacity as men of culture, not as men of property or of enterprise. This latter would also be the view to which the men of property on the boards would themselves particularly incline. So it will be held by the spokesmen of content that virtually full discretion in all matters of academic policy is delegated to the academic head of the university, fortified by the advice and consent of the senior members of his faculty; by the free choice of the governing boards, in practice drawn out from under the control of these businessmen in question and placed in the hands of the scholars. And such, commonly, is at least ostensibly the case, in point of form; more particularly as regards those older establishments that are burdened with academic traditions running back beyond the date when their governing boards were taken over by the businessmen, and more particularly in the recent past than in the immediate present or for the establishments of a more recent date.
This complaisant view overlooks the fact that much effective surveillance of the academic work is exercised through the board's control of the budget. The academic staff can do little else than what the specifications of the budget provide for;without the means with which the corporate income should supply them they are as helpless as might be expected.
Imbued with an alert sense of those tangible pecuniary values which they are by habit and temperament in a position to appreciate, a sagacious governing board may, for instance, determine to expend the greater proportion of the available income of the university in improving and decorating its real estate, and they may with businesslike thrift set aside an appreciable proportion of the remainder for a sinking fund to meet vaguely unforeseen contingencies, while the academic staff remains (notoriously) underpaid and so scantily filled as seriously to curtail their working capacity. Or the board may, again, as has also happened, take a thrifty resolution to "concede" only a fraction -- say ten or fifteen per-cent -- of the demands of the staff for books and similar working materials for current use; while setting aside a good share of the funds assigned for such use, to accumulate until at some future date such materials may be purchased at more reasonable prices than those now ruling. These illustrations are not supplied by fancy.
There is, indeed, a visible reluctance on the part of these businesslike boards to expend the corporation's income for those intangible, immaterial uses for which the university is established. These uses leave no physical, tangible residue, in the way of durable goods, such as will justify the expenditure in terms of vendible property acquired; therefore they are prima facie imbecile, and correspondingly distasteful, to men whose habitual occupation is with the acquisition of property. By force of the same businesslike bias the boards unavoidably incline to apportion the funds assigned for current expenses in such a way as to favour those "practical" or quasi-practical lines of instruction and academic propaganda that are presumed to heighten the business acumen of the students or to yield immediate returns in the way of a creditable publicity.
As to the delegation of powers to the academic head. There is always the reservation to be kept in mind, that the academic head is limited in his discretion by the specifications of the budget.
