CHAPTER III
The Academic Administration and Policy
Men dilate on the high necessity of a businesslike
organization and control of the university, its equipment, personnel and routine. What is had in mind in this insistence on an efficient system is that these corporations of learning shall set their affairs in order after the pattern of a well-conducted business concern. In this view the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover. Hence the insistence on business capacity in the executive heads of the universities, and hence also the extensive range of businesslike duties and powers that devolve on them.
Yet when all these sophistications of practical wisdom are
duly allowed for, the fact remains that the university is, in
usage, precedent, and common sense preconception, an
establishment for the conservation and advancement of the higher
learning, devoted to a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. As
such, it consists of a body of scholars and scientists, each and
several of whom necessarily goes to his work on his own
initiative and pursues it in his own way. This work necessarily
follows an orderly sequence and procedure, and so takes on a
systematic form, of an organic kind. But the system and order
that so govern the work, and that come into view in its procedure
and results, are the logical system and order of intellectual
enterprise, not the mechanical or statistical systematization
that goes into effect in the management of an industrial plant or
the financiering of a business corporation.
Those items of human intelligence and initiative that go to
make up the pursuit of knowledge, and that are embodied in
systematic form in its conclusions, do not lend themselves to
quantitative statement, and can not be made to appear on a
balance-sheet. Neither can that intellectual initiative and
proclivity that goes in as the indispensable motive force in the
pursuit of learning be reduced to any known terms of
subordination, obedience, or authoritative direction. No scholar
or scientist can become an employee in respect of his scholarly
or scientific work. Mechanical systematization and authoritative
control can in these premises not reach beyond the material
circumstances that condition the work in hand, nor can it in
these external matters with good effect go farther than is
necessary to supply the material ways and means requisite to the
work, and to adapt them to the peculiar needs of any given line
of inquiry or group of scholars. In order to their best
efficiency, and indeed in the degree in which efficiency in this
field of activity is to be attained at all, the executive
officers of the university must stand in the relation of
assistants serving the needs and catering to the idiosyncrasies
of the body of scholars and scientists that make up the
university;(1*) in the degree in which the converse relation is
allowed to take effect, the unavoidable consequence is wasteful
defeat. A free hand is the first and abiding requisite of
scholarly and scientific work.