第95章 CHAPTER III(9)

The public that so contributes to the habitual bent of the academic executives is necessarily a select fraction of the laity, of course, -- self-selected by virtue of membership in the various clubs, churches and other like organizations under whose auspices the edification and amenities in question are commonly brought into bearing, or by virtue of voluntary attendance at these occasions of quasi-culture and gentility. It is somewhat exclusive fragment of the public, pecuniarily of a middling grade, as is indeed also its case in other than the pecuniary respect. Apart from the (very consequential) convivial gatherings where businessmen will now and again come together and lend a genial ear to these executive spokesmen of philandropism, it will be found that at the audiences, and at their attendant solemnities of hospitality, the assembly is made up of very much the same elements as make up the effective constituency of the moderately well-to-do churches.(9*) Neither the small minority of the wholly idle rich, nor the great majority who work with their hands, are present in appreciable force; particularly not the latter, who are busy elsewhere; nor do the learned class come in evidence in this connection, -- except, of course, the "scholars by appointment," within whose official competency lie precisely such occasions of public evidence.

Doubtless, the largest, tone-giving and effective, constituent in this self-selected public on whose temper the university president typically leans, and from whose bent his canons of circumspection are drawn, is the class of moderately well-to-do and serious-minded women who have outlived the distractions of maternity, and so have come to turn their parental solicitude to the common good, conceived as a sterilization of the proprieties. The controlling ideals of efficiency and expediency in the affairs of the higher learning accordingly, in so far as they are not a precipitate of competitive business principles simply, will be chiefly of this derivation. Not that the captains of erudition need intimately harbour precisely those notions of scholarship which this constituency would enjoin upon them, and for which they dutifully speak in their conciliatory sermons before these audiences; but just as happens in all competitive retail business that has to deal with a large and critical constituency, so here, -- the captains find themselves constrained in their management of the affairs of learning to walk blamelessly in the sight of this quasi-public spirited wing of the laity that has by force of circumstances come to constitute the public, as seen in the perspective of the itinerant philandropist.

The executive and all his works and words must avoid blame from any source from which criticism might conceivably affect the traffic with which he is occupied,such is the first of those politic principles that govern the conduct of competitive business. The university must accordingly be managed with a first view to a creditable rating in those extraneous respects, touching which that select laity that make up the executive's effective public are competent to hold convictions. The resulting canons of management will be chiefly of the nature of tabus, since blame is best avoided by a code of avoidance. and since the forum in which these tabus are audited is a forum in which the matronly negations of piety, propriety and genteel usage take precedence of work, whether scholarly or otherwise, a misdirected cowardice not infrequently comes to rule the counsels of the captains of erudition, -- misdirected not only in the more obvious sense that its guidance is disserviceable to the higher learning, but also (what is more to the immediate point) in the sense that it discredits the executive and his tactics in the esteem of that workday public that does not habitually give tongue over the cups at five-o'clock.(10*)It is perhaps unnecessary, as it would assuredly be ungraceful, to pursue this quasi-personal inquiry into the circumstances that so determine that habitual attitude of the executive. The difficulties of such an ambiguous position should be sufficiently evident, and the character of the demands which this position makes on the incumbent should be similarly evident, so far as regards conduciveness to clean and honest living within the premises of this executive office. It may, however, not be out of place to call to mind one or two significant, and perhaps extenuating, traits among those conventions that go to make up the situation. Unlike what occurs in the conduct of ordinary business and in the professions, there has hitherto been worked out no code of professional ethics for the guidance of men employed in this vocation, -- with the sole exception of that mandatory inter-presidential courtesy that binds all members of the craft to a strict enforcement of the academic black-list, --all of which leaves an exceptionally broad field for casuistry.

So that, unlike what happens in the business community at large, no standardization has here determined the limits of legitimate prevarication; nor can such a standardization and limit be worked out so long as the executive is required, in effect, to function as the discretionary employer of his academic staff and hold them to account as agents for whom he is responsible, at the same time that he must, in appearance, be their confidential spokesman and their colleague in the corporation of learning. And it is impossible to forego either of these requirements, since the discretionary power of use and abuse is indispensable to the businesslike conduct of the enterprise, while the appearance of scholarly co-partnery with the staff is indispensable to that prestige on which rests the continued exercise of this power. And so also it has similarly proved unavoidable (perhaps as an issue of human infirmity) that the executive be guided in effect by a meretricious subservience to extra-scholastic conventions, all the while that he must profess an unbiassed pursuit of "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men."