第93章 CHAPTER III(7)

The first executive duty of the incumbent of office, therefore, is to keep his faculty under control, so as to be able unhampered to carry out the policy of magnitude and secularization with a view to which the governing board has invested him with his powers. This work of putting the faculty in its place has by this time been carried out with sufficient effect, so that its "advice and consent" may in all cases be taken as a matter of course; and should a remnant of initiative and scholarly aspiration show itself in any given concrete case in such a way as to traverse the lines of policy pursued by the executive, he can readily correct the difficulty by exercise of a virtually plenary power of appointment, preferment and removal, backed as this power is by a nearly indefeasible black-list. So well is the academic black-list understood, indeed, and so sensitive and trustworthy is the fearsome loyalty of the common run among academic men, that very few among them will venture openly to say a good word for any one of their colleagues who may have fallen under the displeasure of some incumbent of executive office. This work of intimidation and subornation may fairly be said to have acquired the force of an institution, and to need no current surveillance or effort.(6*)The subservience of the faculty, or of a working majority, may safely be counted on. But the forms of advisement and responsibility are still necessary to be observed; the president is still, by tradition, the senior member of the faculty, and its confidential spokesman. From which follows a certain, at least pro forma, disingenuousness in the executive's coercive control of academic policy, whereby the ostensible discretion and responsibility comes to rest on the faculty, while the control remains with the executive. But, after all, this particular run of ambiguity and evasions has reached such settled forms and is so well understood that it no longer implies an appreciable strain on the executive's veracity or on his diplomatic skill. It belongs under the category of legal fiction, rather than that of effectual prevarication.

So also as regards the businesslike, or bureaucratic, organization and control of the administrative machinery, and its utilization for vocational ends and statistical showing. All that has been worked out in its general features, and calls, in any concrete case, for nothing much beyond an adaptation of general practices to the detail requirements of the special case. It devolves, properly, on the clerical force, and especially on those chiefs of clerical bureau called "deans," together with the many committees-for-the-sifting-of-sawdust into which the faculty of a well-administered university is organized. These committees being, in effect if not in intention, designed chiefly to keep the faculty talking while the bureaucratic machine goes on its way under the guidance of the executive and his personal counsellors and lieutenants. These matters, then, are also well understood, standardized, and accepted, and no longer require a vigilant personal surveillance from the side of the executive.

As is well and seemly for any head of a great concern, these matters of routine and current circumlocution are presently delegated to the oversight of trusted subalterns, in a manner analogous to the delegation of the somewhat parallel duties of the caretakers of the material equipment. Both of these hierarchical corps of subordinates are in a somewhat similar case, in that their duties are of a mechanically standardized nature, and in that it is incumbent on both alike to deal in a dispassionate, not to say impersonal, way each with the particular segment of apparatus and process entrusted to his care; as is right and good for any official entrusted with given details of bureaucratic routine.

The exacting duties that remain personally incumbent on the academic executive, and claiming his ordinary and continued attention, therefore, are those of his own official prestige on the one hand, and the selection, preferment, rejection and proscription of members of the academic staff. These two lines of executive duty are closely correlated; not only in that the staff is necessarily to be selected with a view to their furthering the prestige of their chief and his university, but also in that the executive's experience in the course of this enterprise in publicity goes far to shape his ideals of scholarly endeavour and to establish his standards of expediency and efficiency in the affairs of learning.