Objection to any such measure of abolition is not to be grounded in their impracticability or their inefficiency, --supposing only that they could be carried out in the face of the prejudices of the ignorant and of the selfishly interested parties; the obstacles to any such move lie simply in the popular prejudice which puts implicit faith in large, complicated, and formidable organizations, and in that appetite for popular prestige that animates the class of persons from which the boards and executives are drawn.
This unreasoning faith in large and difficult combinations has been induced in the modern community by its experience with the large-scale organization of the mechanical industries, and still more particularly by the convincing pecuniary efficiency of large capital, authoritative control, and devious methods, in modern business enterprise; and of this popular prejudice the boards of control and their executive officers have at least their full share, -- indeed they owe their place and power in great part to their being animated with something more than an equitable share of this popular prepossession. It is undeniable, indeed it is a matter of course, that so long as the university continues to be made up, as is now customary, of an aggregation of divers and sundry schools, colleges, divisions, etc., each and several of which are engaged in a more or less overt rivalry, due to their being so aggregated into a meaningless coalition, -- so long will something formidable in the way of a centralized and arbitrary government be indispensable to the conduct of the university's affairs; but it is likewise patent that none of the several constituent schools, colleges, etc., are any the better off, in respect of their work, for being so aggregated in such an arbitrary collective organization. The duties of the executive --aside from the calls of publicity and self-aggrandizement -- are in the main administrative duties that have to do with the interstitial adjustments of the composite establishment. These resolve themselves into a co-ordinated standardization of the several constituent schools and divisions, on a mechanically specified routine and scale, which commonly does violence to the efficient working of all these diverse and incommensurable elements; with no gain at any point, excepting a gain in the facility of control control for control's sake, at the best. Much of the official apparatus and routine office-work is taken up with this futile control. Beyond this, and requisite to the due working of this control and standardization, there is the control of the personnel and the checking-up of their task work; together with the disciplining of such as do not sufficiently conform to the resulting schedule of uniformity and mediocrity.
These duties are, all and several, created by the imposition of a central control, and in the absence of such control the need of them would not arise. They are essentially extraneous to the work on which each and several of the constituent schools are engaged, and their only substantial effect on that work is to force it into certain extraneous formalities of routine and accountancy, such as to divert and retard the work in hand. So also the control exercised more at large by the governing board;except in so far as it is the mere mischief-making interference of ignorant outsiders, it is likewise directed to the keeping of a balance between units that need no balancing as against one another; except for the need which so is gratuitously induced by drawing these units into an incongruous coalition under the control of such a board; whose duties of office in this way arise wholly out of the creation of their office.
The great and conspicuous effect of abolishing the academic executive and the governing board would be, of course, that the university organization as now known would incontinently fall to pieces. The several constituent schools would fall apart, since nothing holds them together except the strong hand of the present central government. This would, of course, seem a monstrous and painful outrage to all those persons who are infatuated with a veneration of big thing; to whom a "great" -- that is to say voluminous -- university is an object of pride and loyal affection. This class of persons is a very large one, and they are commonly not given to reJection on the merits of their preconceived ideals of "greatness." So that the dissolution of this "trust"-like university coalition would bitterly hurt their feelings. So intolerable would the shock to this popular sentiment presumably be, indeed, that no project of the kind can have any reasonable chance of a hearing.
Apart from such loss of "prestige value" in the eyes of those whose pride centres on magnitude, the move in question would involve no substantial loss. The chief direct and tangible effect would be a considerable saving in "overhead charges," in that the greater part of the present volume of administrative work would fall away. The greater part -- say, three-fourths -- of the present officers of administration, with their clerical staff, would be lost; under the present system these are chiefly occupied with the correlation and control of matters that need correlation and control only with a view to centralized management.
The aggregate of forces engaged and the aggregate volume of work done in the schools would suffer no sensible diminution.
Indeed, the contemplated change should bring a very appreciably heightened efficiency of all the working units that are now tied up in the university coalition. Each of these units would be free to follow its own devices, within the lines imposed by the work in hand, since none of them would then be required to walk in lock-step with several others with which it had no more vital articulation than the lock-step in question.
