In healthy institutional life there is free play and interaction of
all the forces that go to make up the organic life, and a certain
flexibility is involved in all growth. The student community, is,
after all, in most institutions the prime object of interest. A few
foundations exist for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake,
instruction being incidental; in most institutions, however,
instruction is the foremost and absorbing function, and the student's
welfare is, therefore, the controlling factor. In western colleges,
where the edge of hunger for knowledge has not yet been dulled by
opportunity, it is not an unknown thing for a committee of students to
wait on a president or chancellor and announce the failure of some
professor to prepare himself for recitations by fresh study of his
subject. It would be well if students in eastern colleges would
sometimes put on a similar boldness; they would help heads of colleges
out of very trying difficulties with well-meaning but incompetent or
indolent professors. Undergraduate popularity is often illusive and
unstable, but undergraduate perception of incompetency is often very
keen and discriminating.
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