5. The strategic reason for this is the desire to retain for graduate registration any student who might otherwise prefer to look for graduate instruction elsewhere. The plan has not been found to work well, and it is still on trial.
6. At least one such businesslike chief of bureau has seriously endeavoured so to standardize and control the work of his staff as to have all courses of lectures professed in the department reduced to symmetrical and permanent shape under the form of certified syllabi, which could then be taken over by any member of the staff, at the discretion of the chief, and driven home in the lecture room with the accredited pedagogical circumstance and apparatus. The scheme has found its way into academic anecdote, on the lighter side, as being a project to supply standard erudition in uniform packages, "guaranteed under the pure food law, fully sterilized. and sealed without solder or acids"; to which it is only necessary to "add hot air and serve."7. So, e. g., it is known to have, on occasion, became a difficult question of inter-bureaucratic comity, whether commercial geography belongs of right to the department of geology or to that of economics; whether given courses in Hebrew are equitably to be assigned to the department of Semitics or to that of Religions; whether Church History is in fairness to be classed with profane History or with Divinity, etc., -- questions which, except in point of departmental rivalry, have none but a meretricious significance.
8. Nugatory, that is, for the ostensible purpose of reducing inter-academic rivalry and duplication. However, there are other matters of joint interest to the gild of university executives, as, e.g., the inter-academic, or inter-executive, blacklist, and similar recondite matters of presidential courtesy and prestige, necessary to be attended to though not necessary to be spread abroad.
9. The English pattern of boys' schools and gentlemanly university residence has doubtless afforded notable guidance to the "Educators" who have laboured for the greater gentility of American college life; at the same time that the grave authenticity of these English customs has at many a difficult passage sewed opportunely to take the edge off the gentlemen-educators' sense of shame.
10. Illustrative instances have little value as anecdotes and not much more as circumstantial evidence; their abundance and outrance are such as to have depreciated their value in both respects. Yet to any who may not know of this traffic by familiar contact one or two commonplace instances may perhaps not seem too much. So, a few years ago, in one of the greater of the new universities, a valued member of one of the athletic teams was retained at an allowance of $40 a month as bookkeeper to the janitor of one of the boys' dormitories on the campus. At the same university and about the same time two other athletes were carried on university pay as assistants to the editor of the weekly bulletin announcing the programme of academic events for the week; though in this case, to the relief of the editor in question, only one of the two assistants reported at his office, and that only once, during the year of their incumbency. These, as already remarked, are commonplace occurrences. The more spectacular instances of shrewd management in these premises can not well be dealt with otherwise than by a canny silence; that being also the course approved by current practice.
11. A single instance may tolerantly be admitted here. Among the formal requirements that would admit students to a free pursuit of sportsmanship, at the same university as above mentioned, without imputation of professionalism, was specified the ability to read at sight such a passage in a given foreign language as would satisfy the instructor in charge that the candidate was competent in the language in question. The instructor responsible in this case, a man of high academic rank and gifted with a sympathetic good-will toward the "boys," submitted in fulfilment of the test a copy of the Lord's Prayer in this foreign tongue, and passed the (several) candidates on finding them able passably to repeat the same in English. It would scarcely be fair to distinguish this episode by giving names and places, since equally ingenious expedients have been in use elsewhere.
12. "And then there came another locust and carried off another grain of wheat, and then there came another locust," etc., etc.
13. More than one instance might be cited where a student whose privately avowed and known aim was the study and practice of Law has deliberately been induced by the offer of a fellowship stipend to register, for the time being, as an academic graduate student and as candidate for the academic doctor's degree. In the instances that come to mind the students in question have since completed their law studies and entered practice, without further troubling about the academic degree for which they once were ostensible candidates.
