Among the indispensable general qualifications, therefore, will be a "businesslike" facility in the management of affairs, an engaging address and fluent command of language before a popular audience, and what is called "optimism," -- a serene and voluble loyalty to the current conventionalities and a conspicuously profound conviction that all things are working out for good, except for such untoward details as do not visibly conduce to the vested advantage of the well-to-do businessmen under the established law and order. To secure an appointment to executive office it is not only necessary to be possessed of these qualifications, and contrive to put them in evidence; the aspirant must ordinarily also, to use a colloquialism, be willing and able to "work his passage" by adroit negotiation and detail engagements on points of policy, appointments and administration.
The greater proportion of such aspirants for executive office work their apprenticeship and manage their campaign of office-seeking while engaged in some university employment. To this end the most likely line of university employment is such as will comprise a large share of administrative duties, as, e.g., the deanships that are latterly receiving much attention in this behalf; while of the work of instruction the preference should be given to such undergraduate class-work as will bring the aspirant in wide contact with the less scholarly element of the student body, and with those "student activities" that come favourably under public observation; and more particularly should one go in for the quasi-scholarly pursuits of "university extension"; which will bring the candidate into favourable notice among the quasi-literate leisure class; at the same time this employment conduces greatly to assurance and a flow of popular speech.
It is by no means here intended to convey the assumption that appointments to executive office are currently made exclusively from among aspiring candidates answering the description outlined above, or that the administrative deanships that currently abound in the universities are uniformly looked on by their incumbents as in some sort a hopeful novitiate to the presidential dignity.
The exceptions under both of these general propositions would be too numerous to be set aside as negligible, although scarcely numerous enough or consequential enough entirely to vitiate these propositions as a competent formulation of the typical line of approach to the coveted office. The larger and more substantial exception would, of course, be taken to the generalization as touching the use of the deanships in preparation for the presidency.
The course of training and publicity afforded by the deanships and extension lectures appears to be the most promising, although it is not the only line of approach. So, e.g., as has been remarked in an earlier passage, the exigencies of academic administration will ordinarily lead to the formation of an unofficially organized corps of counsellors and agents or lieutenants, who serve as aids to the executive head. While these aids, factors, and gentlemen-in-waiting are vested with no official status proclaiming their relation to the executive office or their share in its administration, it goes without saying that their vicarious discretion and their special prerogatives of access and advisement with the executive head do not commonly remain hidden from their colleagues on the academic staff, or from interested persons outside the university corporation; nor, indeed, does it appear that they commonly desire to remain unknown.
In the same connection, as has also been remarked above, and as is sufficiently notorious, among the large and imperative duties of executive office is public discourse. This is required, both as a measure of publicity at large and as a means of divulging the ostensible aims, advantages and peculiar merits of the given university and its chief. The volume of such public discourse, as well as the incident attendance at many public and ceremonial functions, is very considerable; so much so that in the case of any university of reasonable size and spirit the traffic in these premises is likely to exceed the powers of any one man, even where, as is not infrequently the case, the "executive" head is presently led to make this business of stately parade and promulgation his chief employment. In effect, much of this traffic will necessarily be delegated to such representatives of the chief as may be trusted duly to observe its spirit and intention; and the indicated bearers of these vicarious dignities and responsibilities will necessarily be the personal aids and counsellors of the chief; which throws them, again, into public notice in a most propitious fashion.
So also, by force of the same exigencies of parade and discourse, the chief executive is frequently called away from home on a more or less extended itinerary; and the burden of dignity attached to the thief office is such as to require that its ostensible duties be delegated to some competent lieutenant during these extensive absences of the chief; and here, again, this temporary discretion and dignity will most wisely and fittingly be delegated to some member of the corps of personal aids who stands in peculiarly close relations of sympathy and usefulness to the chief. It has happened more than once that such an habitual "acting head" has come in for the succession to the executive office.
