This necessity of employing scientists of a commanding force and rank raises a point of some delicacy in the administration of the competitive university. It is necessary to assign these men a relatively high rank in the academic hierarchy; both because they will accept no subordinate place and because the advertising value of their prestige will be curtailed by reducing them to an inconspicuous position. And with high rank is necessarily associated a relatively large discretion and a wide influence in academic affairs, at least on the face of things. Such men, so placed, are apt to be exacting in matters which they conceive to bear on the work in their own sciences, and their exactions may not be guided chiefly by the conspicuousness of the equipment which they require or of the results at which they aim. They are also not commonly adroit men of affairs, in the business sense of the term; not given to conciliatory compromises and an exhibition of complaisant statistics. The framing of shrewd lines of competitive strategy, and the bureaucratic punctilios of university administration, do not commonly engage their best interest, even if it does not stir them to an indecorous impatience.(2*)Should such a man become unduly insistent in his advocacy of scholarship, so as seriously to traverse the statistical aspirations of the executive, or in any way to endanger the immediate popular prestige of the university, then it may become an open question whether his personal prestige has not been bought at too high a cost. As a business proposition, it may even become expedient to retire him. But his retirement may not be an easy matter to arrange. The businesslike grounds of it can not well be avowed, since it is involved in the scheme of academic decorum, as well as in the scheme of publicity, that motives of notoriety must not be avowed. Colourable grounds of another kind must be found, such as will divert the popular imagination from the point at issue. By a judicious course of vexation and equivocations, an obnoxious scientist may be manoeuvred into such a position that his pride will force a "voluntary" resignation.
Failing this, it may become necessary, however distasteful, delicately to defame his domestic life, or his racial, religious or political status. In America such an appeal to the baser sentiments will commonly cloud the issue sufficiently for the purpose in hand, even though it all has nothing to do with the man's fitness for university work. Such a step, however, is not to be taken unless the case is urgent; if there is danger of estranging the affections of potential donors, or if it involves anything like overt disloyalty to the executive head.
This is one of the points at which it is necessary to recall the fact that no settled code of business ethics has yet been worked out for the guidance of competitive university management;nor is it easy to see how such a code can be worked out, so long as the university remains ostensibly a seat of learning, unable to avow any other ground of action than a single-minded pursuit of knowledge. It has been alleged -- indeed it is fast becoming a tradition -- that the executives of the great competitive universities habitually allow some peculiar latitude as touches the canons of truth and fair dealing. If this describes the facts, it should not be counted against these discreet men who so have to tax their ingenuity, but against the situation in which they are placed, which makes it impracticable to observe a nice discrimination in matters of veracity. Statements of fact, under such conditions, will in great part be controlled by the end to be accomplished, rather than by antecedent circumstances; such statements are necessarily of a teleological order. As in other competitive business, facts have in this connection only a strategic value; but the exigencies of strategy here are peculiarly exacting, and often rigorous.
Academic tradition and current common sense unite in imposing on the universities the employment of prominent scholars and scientists, in that men of note in this class have a high prestige value for purposes of publicity; and it was suggested above that a reservation of some breadth must be made on this head. Common notoriety is the due test of eminence which the competitive university must apply in the selection of its notables. But in the sciences that deal with the less tangible and measureable data, the so-called moral or social sciences, common notoriety is not even an approximately accurate index of scientific capacity or attainments; and still it is, of course, the standing of the incumbents in point of common notoriety that must chiefly be had in view in any strict valuation of them for purposes of academic prestige. They are needed for the advertising value which they bring, and for this purpose they are valuable somewhat in proportion to the rank awarded them by common report among that unlearned element, whose good opinion the competitive university must conciliate. But in the nature of the case, within the range of sciences named, the estimate of the unlearned is necessarily in the wrong.
