It is not an easy or a graceful matter for a businesslike executive to get rid of any undecorative or indecorous scientist, whose only fault is an unduly pertinacious pursuit of the work for which alone the university claims to exist, whose failure consists in living up to the professions of the executive instead of professing to live up to them. Academic tradition gives a broad, though perhaps uncertain, sanction to the scientific spirit that moves this obscure element in the academic body. And then, their more happily gifted, more worldly-wise colleagues have also a degree of respect for such a single-minded pursuit of knowledge, even while they may view these naive children of impulse with something of an amused compassion; for the general body of the academic staff is still made up largely of men who have started out with scholarly ideals, even though these ideals may have somewhat fallen away from them under the rub of expediency. At least in a genial, speculative sense of the phrase, scholarship still outranks official preferment in the esteem of the generality of academic men, particularly so long as the question does not become personal and touch their own preferment. In great part the academic corps still understands and appreciates the scholarly animus, and looks, on the whole, kindly and sympathetically -- indeed, with a touch of envy -- on those among them who are so driven to follow their own scientific bent, to the neglect of expedient gentility and publicity.
The like can, of course, not be so freely said of that body of businessmen in whom is vested the final control; yet this sentiment of genial approval that pervades the academic body finds some vague response even among these; and in any event it is always to be reckoned with and is not to be outraged, unless for a good and valuable consideration. It can not altogether be set aside, although, it is true, the conduct of certain executive heads, grown old in autocratic rule and self-complacency, may at times appear to argue the contrary. So that, by and large, there results an unstable compromise between the requirements of scholarly fitness and those of competitive enterprise, with a doubtful and shifting issue. Just at present, under the firm hand of an enterprising and autocratic executive, the principles of competitive business are apparently gaining ground in the greater universities, where the volume of traffic helps to cloud the details of suppression, and the cult of learning is gradually falling into a more precarious position.
In a curious way, too, the full swing of business principles in academic life is hindered by the necessary ways and means through which these principles are worked out; so much so, indeed, as to throw a serious doubt on their ultimately achieving an undivided dominion. Taken as a business concern, the university is in a very singular position. The reason for its being, at all, is the educational aspiration that besets modern mankind. Its only ostensible reason for being, and so for its being governed and managed, competitively or otherwise, is the advancement of learning. And this advancement of learning is in no degree a business proposition; and yet it must, for the present at least, remain the sole ostensible purpose of the businesslike university. In the main, therefore, all the competitive endeavours and manoeuvres of the captains of erudition in charge must be made under cover of an ostensible endeavour to further this non-competitive advancement of learning, at all costs. Since learning is not a competitive matter; since, indeed, competition in any guise or bearing in this field is detrimental to learning; the competitive manoeuvres of the academic executive must be carried on surreptitiously, in a sense, cloaked as a non-competitive campaign for the increase of knowledge without fear or favour.
