The Academic Personnel As regards the personnel of the academic staff the control enforced by the principles of competitive business is more subtle, complex and far-reaching, and should merit more particular attention. The staff is the university, or it should so be if the university is to deserve the place assigned it in the scheme of civilization. Therefore the central and gravest question touching current academic policy is the question of its bearing on the personnel and the work which there is for them to do. In the apprehension of many critics the whole question of university control is comprised in the dealings of the executive with the staff.
Whether the power of appointment vests formally in one man or in a board, in American practice it commonly vests, in effect, in the academic executive. In practice, the power of removal, as well as that of advancement, rests in the same hands. The businesslike requirements of the case bring it to this outcome de facto, whatever formalities of procedure may intervene de jure.
It lies in the nature of the case that this appointing power will tend to create a faculty after its own kind. It will be quick to recognize efficiency within the lines of its own interests, and slower to see fitness in those lines that lie outside of its horizon, where it must necessarily act on outside solicitation and hearsay evidence.
The selective effect of such a bias, guided as one might say, by a "consciousness of kind," may be seen in those establishments that have remained under clerical tutelage; where, notoriously, the first qualification looked to in an applicant for work as a teacher is his religious bias. But the bias of these governing boards and executives that are under clerical control has after all been able to effect only a partial, though far-reaching, conformity to clerical ideals of fitness in the faculties so selected; more especially in the larger and modernized schools of this class. In practice it is found necessary somewhat to wink at devotional shortcomings among their teachers; clerical, or pronouncedly devout, scientists that are passably competent in their science, are of very rare occurrence; and yet something presentable in the way of modern science is conventionally required by these schools, in order to live, and so to effect any part of their purpose. Half a loaf is better than no bread. None but the precarious class of schools made up of the lower grade and smaller of these colleges, such as are content to save their souls alive without exerting any effect on the current of civilization, are able to get along with faculties made up exclusively of God-fearing men.
Something of the same kind, and in somewhat the same degree, is true for the schools under the tutelage of businessmen. While the businesslike ideal may be a faculty wholly made up of men highly gifted with business sense, it is not practicable to assemble such a faculty which shall at the same time be plausibly competent in science and scholarship. Scientists and scholars given over to the pursuit of knowledge are conventionally indispensable to a university, and such are commonly not largely gifted with business sense, either by habit or by native gift.
The two lines of interest -- business and science -- do not pull together; a competent scientist or scholar well endowed with business sense is as rare as a devout scientist -- almost as rare as a white blackbird. Yet the inclusion of men of scientific gifts and attainments among its faculty is indispensable to the university, if it is to avoid instant and palpable stultification.
So that the most that can practically be accomplished by a businesslike selection and surveillance of the academic personnel will be a compromise; whereby a goodly number of the faculty will be selected on grounds of businesslike fitness, more or less pronounced, while a working minority must continue to be made up of men without much business proficiency and without pronounced loyalty to commercial principles.
This fluctuating margin of limitation has apparently not yet been reached, perhaps not even in the most enterprising of our universities. Such should be the meaning of the fact that a continued commercialization of the academic staff appears still to be in progress, in the sense that businesslike fitness counts progressively for more in appointments and promotions. These businesslike qualifications do not comprise merely facility in the conduct of pecuniary affairs, even if such facility be conceived to include the special aptitudes and proficiency that go to the making of a successful advertiser. In academic circles as elsewhere businesslike fitness includes solvency as well as commercial genius. Both of these qualifications are useful in the competitive manoeuvres in which the academic body is engaged. But while the two are apparently given increasing weight in the selection and grading of the academic personnel, the precedents and specifications for a standard rating of merit in this bearing have hitherto not been worked out to such a nicety as to allow much more than a more or less close approach to a consistent application of the principle in the average case. And there lies always the infirmity in the background of the system that if the staff were selected consistently with an eye single to business capacity and business animus the university would presently be functa officio, and the captain of erudition would find his occupation gone.
