valuable contributions to the scientific literature of his subject, is out of place in a university. He should be transferred to a high school or normal school. Moreover, a university professor who does not desire scientific posterity, so to speak, in the form of able students to carry on his work of extending the bounds of human knowledge should not be kept in a university faculty as a teacher. Such professors will teach and investigate instead of trying to increase their personal revenue by overworking the brain and body in doing merely pot-boiling work. Many men now in American universities would of course be excluded from the calling by the application of such tests, but the universities would become a far higher form of educational organization. After the university has once set before itself the proper ideals and the community provides the necessary funds, there will be a sufficient supply of able investigators who are also good teachers to fill the chairs of any number of universities—at least as well as they are filled now by the best type of existing professors. In that university of 1968, no professor will debauch his department or his work by putting in his own son or son-in-law as assistant to himself or by making an agreement with a colleague tacit or expressed by which each should look after the other's son. This form of graft has not been unknown in our American universities. I worked in three great institutions of learning before coming to Illinois,-Pennsylvania, Chicago and Northwestern, and in each of these institutions, and in many others too, some departments and in some cases several departments have been almost ruined by a policy of flagrant nepotism. Of all forms of illegitimate influence in the working of a great university, the most subtle, the most disintegrating, the most corrupting is the family form. Neither ecclesiasticism nor party politics can be compared with nepotism in its power to debase standards and conduct. In that new university of 1968 the principle will be adopted that one member of a family is sufficient representation in any university faculty, and family will be interpreted to extend to the fourth degree of relationship. The system of nepotism is bad enough in a small college like Williams or Amherst in which it has produced as the Englishman would say "rotten results." In a great university like Illinois it becomes a very serious danger and that for a very simple reason. We have so many different kinds of talent, including so many different kinds of positions that the relatives of a professor or a member of the board of trustees could all be taken care of in some form or other, if the principle were once admitted. The professor of Greek, for example, with ten children-we have had no such one at Illinois-might find it difficult to place more than one of his children in the faculty of an institution like Beloit or Knox. But in the University of Illinois he would have a rare opportunity. He might place one in the Department of Greek, one in the Department of Modern Languages, another in the Engineering Department, another in Domestic Science, another in Dairying or in a stenographic position, another among the stable men and so forth and so forth, until the entire family might be cared for. And from my experience there is absolutely no limit to which such a practice would be carried, if permitted, except the willingness of the public to put up with it. With such a planting of relatives the entire faculty would soon be so honeycombed with relations and inter-relations that no question affecting a person, that is, affecting appointments in the university or promotions or salaries, could be decided on its merits. One member of a family at a time on a faculty is sufficient. Such a rule is of course a mere mechanical device, purely negative in its character, and would not of itself, even if strictly interpreted, get a single firstclass man into a faculty; but it would exclude a very undesirable class, namely, those recommended to positions because of relationship, becoming ever more undesirable in proportion as it grows larger. In closing this rather rambling introduction, it may be of interest for the man who may be president of the university in 1968 to see over how great a length of time the personal touch may reach of the men who were on the first board of trustees, appointed by the Governor in March, 1867. I knew personally either as boy or man Honorable Newton Bateman, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, J. C. Burroughs, Emory Cobb, J. C. Cunningham, O. B. Galusha, Richard J. Oglesby, Governor of Illinois, and Doctor John Milton Gregory, the Regent. Of the first faculty, serving or elected in the Spring term of 1868, I knew nearly half aside from the Regent-Professor G. W. Atherton, Professor J. W. Powell, Professor Thomas J. Burrill and Professor Edward Eggleston and Professor Joseph A. Sewall. Doctor Burrill had been a student and was a graduate of the State Normal University at Normal, Illinois, where I prepared for college, and although he had graduated before I entered school, I had heard much of him and saw him frequently. He won for himself very early in his career a distinguished place in the list of scientific investigators. Professor Atherton became subsequently president of the State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Pennsylvania. He was a man of power and perhaps of more influence in the passage of the Hatch Act, establishing the agricultural experiments stations than any other man. Professor Powell was curator of the museum of natural history and geology in the Normal University and professor of Geology in the Illinois Wesleyan University. He became subsequently one of the most distinguished geologists of his generation, and may be said as director to have built up the United States Geological Survey. Edward Eggleston was the well-known author of the "Hoosier Schoolmaster," a man of influence and power in his generation throughout the country. Joseph A. Sewall, a former teacher of mine in the State Normal University at Normal was elected professor but subsequently declined the position. He became later President of the University of Colorado. He gave the first commencement address at the university before the literary societies at the close of the first term, Friday, June 12, 1868. I knew personally many of the men who were interested in the struggle to locate the land grant college, particularly those in McLean County, Jesse W. Fell, A. Gridley, William J. Rutledge, L. A. Hovey. Of the men who were active in the very beginning of the agitation for industrial universities, I knew intimately William Pennell, Daniel Wilkins, L. A. Hovey, and Charles E. Hovey, B. G. Root and N. A. Brown. In addition, of the prominent men who were present at the opening of the university or who wrote letters expressing their regret at not being able to be present, I knew General John A. Logan, S. W. Moulton and Senator Shelby M. Cullom. Illinois! aeternum floreat! Ёжилий May 1, 1918. |