s man as he can
do it. It is on the business man that he models himself. He has a
little place that he calls his "office," with a typewriter machine and
a stenographer. Here he sits and dictates letters, beginning after the
best business models, "in re yours of the eighth ult., would say, etc.,
etc." He writes these letters to students, to his fellow professors, to
the president, indeed to any people who will let him write to them. The
number of letters that he writes each month is duly counted and set
to his credit. If he writes enough he will get a reputation as an
"executive," and big things may happen to him. He may even be asked
to step out of the college and take a post as an "executive" in a soap
company or an advertising firm. The man, in short, is a "hustler," an
"advertiser" whose highest aim is to be a "live-wire." If he is not, he
will presently be dismissed, or, to use the business term, be "let go,"
by a board of trustees who are themselves hustlers and live-wires. As to
the professor's soul, he no longer needs to think of it as it has been
handed over along with all the others to a Board of Censors.

The American professor deals with his students according to his lights.
It is his business to chase them along over a prescribed ground at a
prescribed pace like a flock of sheep. They all go humping together over
the hurdles with the professor chasing them with a set of "tests" and
"recitations," "marks" and "attendances," the whole apparatus obviously
copied from the time-clock of the business man's factory. This process
is what is called "showing results." The pace set is necessarily that
of the slowest, and thus results in what I have heard Mr. Edward Beatty
describe as the "convoy system of education."

In my own opinion, reached after fifty-two years of profound reflection,
this system contains in itself the seeds of destruction. It puts a
premium on dulness and a penalty on genius. It circumscribes that
latitude of mind which is the real spirit of learning. If we persist
in it we shall presently find that true learning will fly away from our
universities and will take rest wherever some individual and enquiring
mind can mark out its path for itself.

Now the principal reason why I am led to admire Oxford is that the place
is little touched as yet by the measuring of "results," and by this
passion for visible and provable "efficiency." The whole system at
Oxford is such as to put a premium on genius a