Such is the object-lesson afforded by business practice as it bears on the duties incumbent on the academic head and on the powers of office delegated to him. It is needless to remark on what is a fact of common notoriety, that this rule drawn from the conduct of competitive business is commonly applied without substantial abatement in the conduct of academic affairs.(4*)Under this rule the academic staff becomes a body of graded subalterns, who share confidence of the chief in varying degrees, but who no decisive voice in the policy or the conduct of affairs of the concern in whose pay they are held. The faculty is conceived as a body of employees, hired to render certain services and turn out certain scheduled vendible results.
The chief may take advice; and, as is commonly the practice in analogous circumstances in commercial business, he will be likely to draw about him from among the faculty a conveniently small number of advisers who are in sympathy with his own ambitions, and who will in this way form an unofficial council, or cabinet, or "junta," to whom he can turn for informal, anonymous and irresponsible, advice and moral support at any juncture. He will also, in compliance with charter stipulations and parliamentary usage, have certain officially recognized advisers, -- the various deans, advisory committees, Academic Council, University Senate, and the like, -- with whom he shares responsibility, particularly for measures of doubtful popularity, and whose advice he formally takes coram publico; but he can not well share discretion with these, except on administrative matters of inconsequential detail. For reasons of practical efficiency, discretion must be undivided in any competitive enterprise. There is much fine-spun strategy to be taken care of under cover of night and cloud.
But the academic tradition, which still drags on the hands of the captains of erudition, has not left the ground prepared for such a clean-cut businesslike organization and such a campaign of competitive strategy. By tradition the faculty is the keeper of the academic interests of the university and makes up a body of loosely-bound noncompetitive co-partners, with no view to strategic team play and no collective ulterior ambition, least of all with a view to engrossing the trade. By tradition, and indeed commonly by explicit proviso, the conduct of the university's academic affairs vests formally in the president, with the advice and consent of the faculty, or of the general body of senior members of the faculty. In due observance of these traditions, and of the scholastic purposes notoriously underlying all university life, certain forms of disinterested zeal must be adhered to in all official pronouncements of the executive, as well as certain punctilios of conference and advisement between the directive head and the academic staff.
All of which makes the work of the executive head less easy and ingenuous than it might be. The substantial demands of his position as chief of a competitive business are somewhat widely out of touch with these forms of divided responsibility that must (formally) be observed in administering his duties, and equally out of touch with the formal professions of disinterested zeal for the cause of learning that he is by tradition required to make from time to time. All that may reasonably be counted on under these trying circumstances is that he should do the best he can, -- to save the formalities and secure the substance. To compass these difficult incongruities, he will, as already remarked above, necessarily gather about him, within the general body of the academic personnel, a corps of trusted advisors and agents, whose qualifications for their peculiar work is an intelligent sympathy with their chief's ideals and methods and an unreserved subservience to his aims, -- unless it should come to pass, as may happen in case its members are men of force and ingenuity, that this unofficial cabinet should take over the direction of affairs and work out their own aims and purposes under cover of the chief's ostensibly autocratic rule.
Among these aids and advisers will be found at least a proportion of the higher administrative officials, and among the number it is fairly indispensable to include one or more adroit parliamentarians, competent to procure the necessary modicum of sanction for all arbitrary acts of the executive, from a distrustful faculty convened as a deliberative body. These men must be at least partially in the confidence of the executive head. From the circumstances of the case it also follows that they will commonly occupy an advanced academic rank, and so will take a high (putative) rank as scholars and scientists. High academic rank comes of necessity to these men who serve as coadjutors and vehicles of the executive policy, as does also the relatively high pay that goes with high rank; both are required as a reward of merit and an incitement to a zealous serviceability on the one hand, and to keep the administration in countenance on the other hand by giving the requisite dignity to its agents. They will be selected on the same general grounds of fitness as their chief, -- administrative facility, plausibility, proficiency as public speakers and parliamentarians, ready versatility of convictions, and a staunch loyalty to their bread.
Experience teaches that scholarly or scientific capacity does not enter in any appreciable measure among the qualifications so required for responsible academic office, beyond what may thriftily serve to mask the conventional decencies of the case.
